I'm used to a feeling of doubleness, of thinking one thing and having to do another, a constant tug-of-war.

Things would get difficult again. But that was okay too. The bravery was in moving forward, no matter what.

We can never understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light.

People need other people to feel things for them," she said. "It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.

I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other's wounds; they repair the broken skin.

What glitters may not be gold; and even wolves may smile; and fools will be led by promises to their deaths.

My stomach gets that hollowed-out feeling. It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart.

I am growing stronger. I am a stone being excavated by the slow passage of water; I am wood charred by a fire.

Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all. I told on them. I was jealous.

I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.

Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore.

This is the strange way of the world, that people who simply want to love are instead forced to become warriors.

At a certain point your brain stops to rationalize things. At a certain point it gives up, shuts off, shuts down.

Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that-what we felt, what it meant- that's done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.

I just want to be normal, like everybody else." "Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?

I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

...if you are one tardy away from missing out on a big competition, you should probably make your coffee at home.

Sarah: "Not bad. You look almost human." Lena: "Thanks." Sarah: "I said almost." Lena: "Well, then, almost thanks.

People are like ants: Just a few of them give all the orders. And most of them spend their lives getting squashed.

Let me tell you something about dying: it's not as bad as they says. it's the coming-back-to-life part that hurts.

i suppose that's the secret, if you're ever wishing for things to back the way they were. You just have to look up.

No one can tell us no. No one can make us stop. We have picked each other and the rest of the world can go to hell.

The priests and the scientists are right about one thing: At our heart, at our base, we are no better than animals.

You have to go forward: It's the only way. You have to go forward no matter what happens. This is the universal law.

It won't matter if nobody ever thinks I'm pretty (although sometimes I wish, just for a second, that somebody would)

I put my forehead on his collarbone, place one hand on his chest. Its rhythm reassures me: He is real, and he is now.

Now I'd rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie.

I screamed until my voice dried up in my throat. We all did. All of us in Ward Six, all of us forgotten, left to rot.

Somewhere in the endless spinning of eternity that one, tiny, fraction of a second where our lips met is lost forever.

And even though I'm standing in the middle of the biggest crowd I've ever seen in my life, I suddenly feel very alone.

And when it started to get dark you pointed to the sky, and told me there was a star for every thing you loved about me.

Here's another thing to remember: hope keeps you alive. Even when you're dead, it's the only thing that keeps you alive.

Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.

willing me to understand: that people should be sacrificed to causes, that beauty can be built on the backs of the dead.

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.

We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us.

I still wanted to know why. As though somebody was going to answer that for me, as though any answer would be satisfying.

Welcome to the free world. We give people the power to choose. They can even choose the wrong thing. Beautiful, isn't it?

Funny how time heals. Like that bullet in my ribs. It's there, I know it's there, but I can barely feel it at all anymore.

For the first time in my life I've done something for me and by choice and not because somebody told me it was good or bad.

I need him to know that I came for him. I need him to know that somehow, at some point in the tunnels, I began to love him.

Most people don't want to be saved. Besides, if you keep bailing everybody out, they'll never learn to paddle on their own.

i feel like a curtain has dropped away and i'm seeing people for who they really are, different, and sharp, and unknowable.

It's funny, isn't it? When you are young you just want to be old, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.

The reason you can never go home again isn't necessarily that places change, but people do. So nothing ever looks the same.

For a moment, my heart aches for him. I should never have asked him to join me here; I should never have asked him to cross.

I've been so used to thinking of what the borders are keeping out that I haven't considered that they're also penning us in.

That's the way I feel, at least: like there's a real me and a reflection of me, and I have no way of telling which is which.

Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who's with who and did you hear.

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