“It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.”

“How do you tell someone that you weren't the person he thought you were? And more importantly, how did you tell him that you'd meant the things you'd said, when everything else about you turned out to be a lie.”

“I'm telling you, you did what you believed you had to do through all of this. Not what was easiest or best for you. You did what you did, and you're owning it. And I don't know ten men who would be brave enough to do that.”

“The secret was pretty simple — wearing the right clothes wasn’t as important as how you felt in them. Being beautiful was about what you did with what you had. Popularity was like that too — it was all about attitude. You had to picture who you wanted to be and then just imagine that’s who you already were.”

“The difficult thing, the glorious thing, was to be who you really were, even if that person was cruel or dangerous, particularly if cruel and dangerous. There was courage in not distinguishing the animal you happened to be. On the other hand, you had to avoid pretending to be more of an animal than you were: take that path, start exaggerating or faking and you became just another Cubby, just as much of a liar, a hypocrite”

“Home was not the place where you were born but the place you created yourself, where you did not need to explain, where you finally became what you were.”