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.

Levi was smiling. He kicked her chair again.

When you make yourself a better you, you inevitably make a better life for your family. That's the thing I'll always embrace and you should too. Better yourself. Enjoy your life.

I don't do relationships because I don't want to love and lose myself.

A good book...leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

We have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art.

If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher.

It is a miracle of harmony, of the adaptation of the free inner life to the outward necessity of things.

Shamanism is being reinvented in the West precisely because it is needed

My game is like a cross between karaoke and rap: crap.

By letting go of what you thought was going to happen in your life, you can enjoy what is actually happening.

With caution judge of probability. Things deemed unlikely, e'en impossible, experience oft hath proved to be true.