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.

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.

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.

Levi was smiling. He kicked her chair again.

The government can make laws but they can’t make people live by these laws

Catastrophe is change on the fast track. Disaster is a laboratory for adaptability.

Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.

There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world.

Life is like a hot bath. It feels good while you're in it, but the longer you stay, the more wrinkled you get.

Who loves not music and the heavenly muse, That man God hates.

Every one who has labored honestly in the past has aided to place knowledge and comfort within the reach of a constantly increasing number.

He who faces no calamity gains no courage.

For the water animals, the ocean is like a garden; for the land animals, it is death and pain.

What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.