“I read it over and over again. I turned it over, turned it back, smoothed it out on my pillow and then read it some more. It was written on a piece of torn-out spiral notebook paper. It had seams like it had been folded and unfolded a few times. I looked into the manila envelope again to see if there was anything else. There wasn't.”

“I looked around the cafeteria. There was a little paper product city set-up on one of the folding tables next to the empty salad bar- stacks of napkins, towers of cups.”

“When we started walking to the computer room, I thought I was pretty prepared because I had managed to withdraw the balled-up outline worksheet from the paper graveyard under my bed.”

“Everyday we have to go to classroom 107A, where portions of English, math and social studies are meted out like different nutrients of a hospital diet.”

“...sentences swallowed and sung back and swallowed all over again. She was made entirely out of words.”

“Some of them were confused and angry, but given the same circumstances, I was convinced that I would have turned out just like them. It was the difference in where we were born, and to whom, that separated us---not the difference of who we were.”

“He had written in cheap ballpoint ink that had blotted the five pages in many places. His handwriting was a looping but legible scrawl, and ha must have been bearing down hard, because the words were actually engraved into the cheap notebook pages; if I'd closed my eyes and run my fingertips over the backs of those torn-out sheets, it would have been like reading Braille”