“People are like ants: Just a few of them give all the orders. And most of them spend their lives getting squashed.”

“Here are the top three things I’ve learned in my twenty-two years on the planet:1. Never wipe your butt with poison ivy.2. People are like ants: Just a few of them give all the orders. And most of them spend their lives getting squashed.3. There are no happy endings, only breaks in the regular action.Of all of them, number three is really the only one you have to keep in mind”

“But hope got in, no matter how hard and fast I tried to stomp it out. Like these tiny fire ants we used to get in Portland. No matter how fast you liked them, there were always more, a steady stream of them, resistant, ever-multiplying.Maybe, the hope said. Maybe.”

“I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.”

“People need other people to feel things for them," she said. "It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.”

“I think of Lindsay in the bathroom of Rosalita’s, and wonder how many people are clutching secrets like little fists, like rocks sitting in the pits of their stomachs. All of them, maybe.”

“It strikes me how strange people are. You can see them every day, you can think you know them and then you found out you hardly know them at all.”