If I can write a book that will help the world make a little more sense to a teen, then that's why I was put on the planet.

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.

They swore by concrete. They built for eternity.

Once I started working with older people, I realized how much I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of taking care of patients who have multiple, complex medical problems.

Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.

Food can heal and renew. Food can be your anti-aging medicine.

Even when it was easy, music's patterning shaped the emotions . . . Music proclaimed an orderly universe, promised a better place.

Being poor is a normal thing.

[On social change:] What I say is that if one country is annexed by another, its nationality is not changed overnight. Social processes are often very, very slow.

There's a sort of decency among the dead, a remarkable discretion: you never find them making any complaint against the doctor who killed them!

I love different themes, different venues, different movies. I love to jump about and tackle different subjects. I have no intellectual master plan.

Creativity is not enough... the skill of the true artist is to show the real in the light of the ideal and so transfigure it.