This camp is a forge for the army; it's testing our mettle. Instead of heat and hammer, our trials are cold and hunger. Question is, what are we made of?

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.

One of the real tests of Christian character is to be found in the lives we live from day to day.

don't turn over rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live underneath them.

I remember when I was in school, they would ask, 'What are you going to be when you grow up?' and then you'd have to draw a picture of it. I drew a picture of myself as a bride.

I would like a UK fully engaged in Europe, but I can't decide in place of the British. I see that for the moment they want to be more in retreat.

Failure is a state of mind. It's like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.

It truly sucks to doubt your friends when you only have one or two of them, I realized.

If a supernatural power tries to make you a saint or an emperor, refuse it, because the greatest beauty of life hides in having no position whatsoever! Positionless is the best position!

I hate to play a tournament in which I'm not contending. It's just not any fun for me.

Not to take this web of dualities as a sign we are on the right track would be a bit like believing that God put fossils into the rocks in order to mislead Darwin about the evolution of life.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced.