I wish adults would spend less energy freaking out about the cutting itself and work harder to understand what drives kids to self-harm.

You’re not dead, but you’re not alive, either. You’re a wintergirl.

I want to go to sleep and not wake up, but I don’t want to die.

Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care... -Wintergirls

We turned us into wintergirls, and when she tried to leave, I pulled her back into the snow because I was afraid to be alone.

There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.

I am beginning to measure myself in strength, not pounds. Sometimes in smiles.

So, she tells me, the words dribbling out with the cranberry muffin crumbs, commas dunked in her coffee.

They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs.

In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.

Write about the emotions you fear the most.

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

He would pray...for everyone who knew pain, which meant everyone who wore a human face.

In your heart, create a world full of flowers and love.

A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do we know that his future will not be equal to our present?

If I had only three years to serve the Lord, I would spend two of them studying and preparing.

It's so funny, all the similarities that we have [with David Copperfield] of being obsessed young people and finding a way to be around the people doing what we want to do.

[I am enthusiastic about journalism because] it's a craft that can ... galvanize an often complacent citizenry, and make a difference.

I was on food stamps until I was 18 and became an adult.

Put your foot upon the neck of the fear of criticism by reaching a decision not to worry about what other people think, do, or say.

I guess there is no two races of people in worse repute with everybody than the international bankers, and the folks that put all those pins in new shirts.