“By ten o'clock, the Sunday-night blues set in. The bleak wasteland of an entire week of stupefyingly boring school stretched ahead of me like an endless desert highway.”

“Take me from this earth an endless night- this, the end of life. From the dark I feel your lips and taste your bloody kiss.”

“A long mission was ahead of them, and no one wanted to get on anyone else's nerves with unnecessary chatter.”

“im eaisly influenced by others Do's and Don'ts. How can they bring me up so high, an sink me down like a stone?”

“The effective, identity-safe practices "avoid cues that might instantiate a sense of stereotype threat in students and are, instead, aimed at making everyone in the class feel...as valued and contributive...regardless of their ethnic group or gender." [Dorothy Steele]...The cohering principle is straightforward: they foster a threat-mitigating narrative about one's susceptibility to being stereotyped in the schooling context. And though no single, one-size-fits-all strategy has evolved, the research offers an expanding set of strategies for doing this: establishing trust through demanding but supportive relationships, fostering hopeful narratives about belonging in the setting, arranging informal cross-group conversations to reveal that one's identity is not the sole cause of one's negative experiences in the setting, representing critical abilities as learnable, and using child-centered teaching techniques. More will be known in the years ahead. But what we know now can make a life-affecting difference for many people in many important places.”

“I went into geology because I like being outdoors, and because everybody in geology seemed, well, they all seemed like free spirits or renegades or something. You know, climbing mountains and hiking deserts and stuff.”

“I don’t know, Mitzi.” Kai sighed and stared up at the sky as if it held her answers. Yeah right, for something like her, a demoness? “He makes me feel . . .”Loved?” Mitzi offered.Kai laughed. “Unhinged.”