“there was daunting poverty, and there was haunting wealth and the narrator warned her to keep to herself”

“The easiest thing is to say no. What's not so easy is telling yourself to stop.”

“Witnessing the pain of others is the very least you can do in this world. It's how you know that when your own turn comes, someone will be there with you.”

“We were jigsawed, meant to fit together, making a whole picture.”

“As soon as I saw him again I could forget all this existed; I would be calm. Was that a definition of love: a force that can drug you with calm and help you forget all the sandpaper realities of the world?”

“Rumor even had it that she’d stabbed her webcam with a knife one day, just in case someone took over her PC and filmed her unaware.”

“She never typed her real name into her netbook in case it got key-logged, had no physical hard drive, and would boot up from a tiny microSD card that she could quickly swallow if the police ever came to her door.”