Because I'm the kind of girl who fantasizes about being trapped in a library overnight.

Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.

To really be a nerd, she'd decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one.

I don’t trust anybody. Not anybody. And the more that I care about someone, the more sure I am they’re going to get tired of me and take off.

Smiling is confusing, she thought. This is why I don’t do it.

Months are different in college, especially freshman year. Too much happens. Every freshman month equals six regular months—they're like dog months.

I don't want to do anything. I don't even want to start this day because then I'll just be expected to finish it.

Emergency dance party--go away.

I don't like hello. It makes me sound like I have dementia, like I've never heard a phone ring before and I don't know what's supposed to happen next. Hello?

You flirt with everything." She could tell that her eyes were popping-- her eyeballs actually felt cold around the edges. "You flirt with old people and babies and everybody in between.

She was tired of being the one who cried.

Laughter is carbonated holiness.

Respect your voice. Be a voice for those who do not have a voice.

Words could be like food - they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something.

I'll be quite for now because I make mistakes too... but once The Perfect Almighty One judges you, there are no excuses.

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.

As a young person, you have no fixed address, no studio, no money for materials, so I made things sort of on the run. That life doesn't favor the stability and spatial demands of painting.

The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.

Not all of our heartless plans work as we intend; nor do all of our good intentions. We are where we are, and we can rarely predict where we will go, no matter how firm our beliefs.

A salute from this corner to President Bush for saying he was willing to investigate raising or eliminating the cap on salaries subject to the Social Security tax.

I don’t want normal and easy and simple. I want painful, difficult, devastating, life-changing, extraordinary love.