“I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what's cool.”

“Is it still cool to go to the mall?' she asked. 'I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what's cool,' I answered.”

“Hating the cool kids takes an awful lot of energy, and I'd given up on it a long time ago.”

“I was thinking about this tonight, actually, that maybe I want strangers to think I'm cool since people who actually know me don't.”

“Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.”

“This is all so CHILDISH PATHETIC. YOU'RE EMBARASSING. GET OVER IT GET OVER IT GET OVER IT. But he did not quite know what "it" was.”

“I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well—but never quite perfectly, you know?”