But you don't know what it was like. It was just the two of us that afternoon, and then . . . and then it was just me.

Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people.

My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.

I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.

I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.

You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.

It's hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another.

That's the difference between you and Greta. She has better things to do. She gets involved in clubs, activities. She has friends. But you? You slump around in that room of yours--

It's the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven't done everything they want to do. They think they haven't had enough time. They feel they've been shortchanged.

I suppose I'm in that very small group of people who are not waiting for their own story to unfold. If my life was a film, I'd have walked out by now.

...I felt the wall between the world of secrets and the real world start to collapse. I felt the girls from the portrait becoming us and us becoming them...

Live your life, sing your song. Not full of expectations. Not for the ovations. But for the joy of it.

Shattered edges of the diamonds rough sets to cut the unsuspecting.

Superficially insignificant or accidental looking detail [in art] may well carry the most important unconscious symbolism.

Dictators are actually very fearful themselves. Even when they're asleep, they're afraid that others will take their powers away.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age.

You don't have to wear a sparkly dress all the time! You can wear something that's plain, really, it's okay. No one is going to be mad at you.

Don't worry about what you don't have if you do have faith!

It's getting harder and harder to worry needlessly.

When you stand in the present moment, you are timeless.