“As I make my way through, I feel okayness reaching through me.The funny thing is that okayness is not a real word. It's not in the dictionary.But it's in me.”

“I love you present tense. It's okay, Gus. It's okay. It is. It's okay, you hear me? Okay, okay.”

“He ran back and I watched him go, legs pumping, soles of his zori showing. I love him.It's his face and sometimes the way his eyes turn up to mine that make me feel as ifthings are really okay. It's a lie, of course-things are not okay and never have been-butmy kid makes me believe the lie.”

“I learned that it's okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys in Twue Wuv.”

“It's just nice, I guess. Knowing that someone else can put into words what I feel. That there are people who have been through things worse than I have, and they come out on the other side okay. Not only that, but they made some kind of twisted, fucked-up sense of the completely senseless. They made it mean something. These songs tell me I'm not alone. If you look at it at that way, music... music can see you through anything.”

“An itchy feeling began to work its way through my body, as though a thousand mosquitoes were circulating through my blood, biting me from the inside, making me want to scream, jump, squirm. I ran.”