“The last great escape. I was done gambling, done betting on a ship that would never come in. I would cash in my chips while I was ahead. I didn't want to suffer the growing old, didn't want to wait until my memory went. It was all so tiresome. I would just go out in a blaze of glory before the parasites of sadness got at me and made me bitter. After that's the American way: take your own life before everything else takes it from you.”

“And that is when I know....that is when I understand that it's better to feel the ache inside me like demons scratching at my heart than it is to feel numb the way a dead body feels when you touch it. It's better to wait for the beautiful things...to stare at them for as long as they last..to hold on as tight as you can before they disappear. And it might hurt so bad inside...but it's better to wait for the next beautiful thing than never look for any again.”

“Man, it really gets me down. When everything's exhausted there's nothing left. The rate I was running, it wouldn't be long. Then what? What's next? What's the score? I can't handle the rest of my life suspended in boredom. Such a chore! Gonna burn out because I can't stand to fade away. Get it all in fast and get out. No turning back now. It's just the way it is, the way I need to be.”

“Tears were dripping onto my dress, but I wasn't making any sound. There was no sound to express thid kind of pain.I didn't want to move, didn't want to do anything. Fang was not waiting for me out in the living room. Tomorrow morning, when I woke up, Fang would still be gone.”

“And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”

“There aren't any rules to running away from your problems. No checklist of things to cross off. No instructions. Eeny, meeny, pick a path and go. That's how my dad does it anyway because apparently there's no age limit to running away, either. He wakes up one day, packs the car with everything we own, and we hit the road. Watch all the pretty colors go by until he finds a town harmless enough to hide in. But his problems always find us. Sometimes quicker than others. Sometimes one month and sometimes six. There's no rule when it comes to that, either. Not about how long it takes for the problems to catch up with us. Just that they will—that much is a given. And then it's time to run again to a new town, a new home, and a new school for me.But if there aren't any rules, I wonder why it feels the same every time. Feels like I leave behind a little bit of who I was in each house we've left empty. Scattering pieces of me in towns all over the place. A trail of crumbs dotting the map from everywhere we've left to everywhere we go. And they don't make any pictures when I connect dots. They are random like the stars littering the sky at night.”

“Why did you start to write?I left at 15.. I started to write becase I was taken off a ship from Germany when I was 18. They said I wouldn't live for 6 months.I'd been given up for dead many times and I just didn't want to waste my life. I had what I now realize was a spiritual experience.I realized that I would die,and that just before I would die,two things would happen.number one, I would regret my entire life.and number two, I would want to live my life over again.and then I would die.and that terrified me.[...]to think that I would live my entire life, look at it, and say oh..I blew it. was such a terrifying thoughtthat I bought a typewriterI didn't know what I was going to do with it, but I bought a typewriter.but that is what got me to start writing, wasI did not want to waste my lifeI wanted to, and I HAD to, do something with my life”