I'm sorry Penelope." "Don't waste my time with sorries, Simon.If we stop to apologize and forgive each other every time we step on each other's toes, we'll never have time to be friends.

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.

Sweetie, you don't need to drive me to the brink of insanity... I'm close enough to walk!

Then I woke in the shade of the fig tree in my favorite park, with the gun barrel in my mouth.

It's hard asking someone with a broken heart to fall in love again.

writing is how I understand everything that happens. Writing is the only way I know to move on.

Why do villains have so much influence? Because the honest people are terribly dense.

I think after music is performance because it is also an immaterial form of art, and then there's everything else.

The aim of Wikileaks is to achieve just reform around the world and do it through the mechanism of transparency.

Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words.

The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.

A laugh is the loud echo of a sigh; a sigh the faint echo of a laugh.