“Secrets are more powerful when people know you've got them.”

“If those are your friends, you've got no need for enemies.”

“Roo: What’s your definition of popularity?Hutch: I used to think people were popular because they were good-looking, or nice, or funny, or good at sports. Roo: Aren’t they?Hutch: I’d think, if I could just be those things, I’d – you know – have more friends than I do. But in seventh grade, when Jackson and those guys stopped hanging out with me, I tried as hard as I could to get them to like me again. But then . . . (shaking his head as if to clear it) I don’t really wanna talk about it. Roo: What happened? Hutch: They just did some ugly stuff to me is all. And really, it was for the best. Roo: Why?Hutch: Because I was cured. I realized the popular people weren’t nice or funny or great-looking. They just had power, and they actually got the power by teasing people or humiliating them – so people bonded to them out of fear. Roo: Oh. Hutch: I didn’t want to be a person who could act like that. I didn’t want to ever speak to any person who could act like that. Roo: OhHutch: So then I wasn’t trying to be popular anymore. Roo: Weren’t you lonely?Hutch: I didn’t say it was fun. (He bites his thumbnail, bonsai dirt and all.) I said it was for the best.”

“Love is when you give someone else the power to destroy you, and you trust them not to do it.”

“Most secret societies—at least those you can read about in books or on the Internet—are collegiate. Or adult... They are like fraternities, only they don't have houses or public identities. In colleges, their members are usually local, not national, but the adult ones tend to be more serious and on a larger scale.We don't actually know what they do. Because they're secret.”

“Sex Ed - when I finally got to take it - was all about biology and birth control and nothing about anything that actually goes on between people.”

“It was part of their mission as a secret society--as it is part of the mission of most secret societies, actually--to not be entirely secret.”