“I nodded, pretending to be a hundred times more courageous than I felt.But that was the thing about courage. Sometimes you had to fake it to feel it.”

“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”

“Courage is tricky, oily. Easy to drop, easy to misplace." "I thought that if you had courage you always had it.". . ."Lilah, nothing is always there. Not courage, not joy, not hate or hope or anything else. We find courage, lose it, sometimes misplace it for years, and sometimes live in its grace for a while.”

“I had never liked bullying of any sort, especially when an individual acquires his courage by becoming part of a faceless mob. I always say if you need fake courage, get it out of a bottle like I do.”

“But sometimes it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself.”

“How many more of us are faking the facade? How many more of us are pretending to be something we're not? Even better, how many of us will have the courage to be ourselves regardless of what others think?”