“I knew I was strong, and maybe like they said, "crazy." But I had this feeling inside of me that something real was there.”

“You crazy liar," he said breathlessly."You knew I was lying.""Not to - that degree.""Okay, so maybe I like you a little.”

“Will looked back at me, startled, and I kept my heart muscle strong, feeling something inside me shiver like a pale green flower shoot just waking up for spring. But whatever that thing was, it was still too new to feel ready to bloom; it wanted time to set down roots. Someday soon I was going to bloom like crazy and then I'd have what I needed to keep me standing tall.”

“There’s a kind of gap between what I think is real and what’s really real , I get this feeling like some kind of little something other is there somewhere inside me…..like a burglar is in the house hiding in a closet …and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic I’ve established the way a magnet can make a machine go crazy”

“Or maybe, in my gut, I felt like I was missing out on something. I knew there was more to life than a pixelated curtain. There was a wide, expansive world all around me and I was confined to live inside such a narrow one. And I wanted to break free.”

“I feel a whole country growing inside me, thousands of years, millions of people, stupid, crazy, shrewd people, and all of them me. I never felt like that before, I never felt that there was anything inside me, even myself.”