“Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.”

“Young girls live in mythology.Their music, their moves, their relationships. Heartbreak makes them feel grown-up. Nothing a young girl wants more than to feel grown-up, and she'll lay waste to anyone for the taste of a broken heart.”

“Lies are like muscles: it takes practice to make them strong.”

“Girls my age never use the word “fair”. Ordinary girls as young as I am are basically indifferent to whether things are fair or not. The central question for them is not whether something is fair but whether or not it’s beautiful or will make them happy. “Fair” is a man’s word, finally, but I can’t help feeling that it is also exactly the right word for me now.”

“A strong woman is a woman who craves love like oxygen or she turns blue choking. A strong woman is a woman who loves strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong in words, in action, in connection, in feeling; she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she enacts it as the wind fills a sail.”

“Art, their father had frequently told them, was exactly that: to make art is the realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel with and for a stranger.”