“Anyway, if you need your heroes to be perfect, you won't have very many. Even Superman had his Kryptonite. I'd rather have my heroes be more like me: trying to do the right thing, sometimes messing up. Making mistakes. Saying you're sorry. And forgiving other people when they mess up, too.”

“I used to pinch those pages closed when I read the book to keep from having to see Joan [of Arc] fail. But now I love that picture. I love it so much. I love how Joan kept going right up to the end. It reminds me that sometimes defeat is the price of taking action. If you do something, you become a target. People want to take you down. That's a risk. But it's better to do too much, better to try to hard, better to have a crisis of faith and get thrown and climb back up on your horse and keep riding, than to see something wrong in the world and not do anything at all.”

“The hardest thing about being a parent is watching your kids make mistakes. Our instinct is to protect you. But you're right, Deenie. Sometimes we have to step aside and let you make them anyway. The best we can do is be there when you mess up.”

“Sometimes you have to sacrifice something you love, if you don't want to lose everything you have.”

“I am carved like David,every line of my body perfectly chiseled.Hunger is the blade that has made me smooth.I am a statue, yet I am only air at my center.I go to hug myself and-poof!-my arms go right through mefinding nothing to hold on to.My hands meet behind my own backin a stone handshake.This is not what you were expecting.I'm so cold.I'm so sharp.I've been cut, now I'll cut you.Come closer.Yes, come closer to me.I am going to make you see what I see.”

“I'm sorry, honey. I'm sure if you were a terrorist, you'd make a wonderful one”

“Once," Fran says, settling against the worktable, folding her arms, "I knew this kid who very bravely and bossily came out of the closet when she was only fourteen years old. She told me then that we can't choose who we love. We just love the people we love, no mattter what anyone else might want for us. Wasn't that you?”