“I don't get why prom is like a mini-wedding these days...No one should spend that kind of money for a high school dance.”

“I guess forgiveness, like happiness, isn’t a final destination. You don’t one day get there and get to stay.”

“The hope was, people like me got to finally find our place in college or in the actual world. People who understood this told you that high school wasn't the actual world, that it was more like a temporary alternate reality you were forced to believe in for four years. A video game you played, where you could never get to the next level no matter how hard you tried.”

“This is not just a simple story of "money can't buy happiness." Or maybe that's just what it is. And if it is, why shouldn't it be? Because if this is something we are already supposed to know, then why don't we know it? Why do we chase and scrabble and fight for things to flaunt, why? Why do we reach for power over other people, and through the thin superiority of our possessions, believe we have it? Why do we let money make people bigger, and allow those without it to be made smaller? How did we lose the truth in the frantic, tribal drumbeat of more, more, more?”

“In the two months I had also dated Justin Fellowes, this guy in my Spanish class, though after three weeks we decided we should "see other people," which in my case was a joke, but it beat hearing him remark on everything I ate. 'I don't know why girls are always on a diet,' he'd say when I ordered a Diet Coke, and 'You should watch your starch intake' when I had a muffin.”

“Yeah. When you want what's real and you try to find that in high school, you might as well be looking for a mossy rock beside a babbling brook on the corner of Sixth and Pine in downtown Seattle.”

“I felt a constant, low-flying desperation, the kind you feel when you are trying, trying, trying to get something you will never, ever get.”