“Hunger is a blade that carves meI open my arms and pull the air in-big hug!-then poof, right through me, nobody there.It's only me holding myself.My arms wrap two times around my own ribs,meet behind my back for a secrethandshake.I am not what was expected.I'm so sharp-it's cut me now I'll cut you.Come closercloserNo, come closerI'm gonna make you see what I see.”

“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 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.”

“Look at my glasses. I can't even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it's not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it's me, Madeleine. I don't think Father's eyes are seeing now, but he is. And maybe his brain isn't thinking, but a brain's just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.”

“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?”

“It's not an honest face. It's not a kind face. It's a face made of anger and secrets and lies. From the tight, guarded mouth to the clenched, square jaw to the glossy shimmer of I-dare-you that coats the surface of her eyes, Aimee's face is a scary place for Meghan's gaze to rest. But beneath the gloss, behind the sharpness and tension, deep at Aimee's core, Meghan can see something warm and real. It's the same unnameable thing she saw in the sickroom on the first day of school. It's the same thing she feels pulsing softly deep in her own chest.”

“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.”