“Teenage girls engage in emotional reasoning, which is the belief that if you feel something is true, it must be true. If a teenager feels like a nerd, she is a nerd....There is a limited ability to sort facts from feelings. Thinking is still magical in the sense that thinking something makes it so.”

“Every teenager in the world feels like that, feels broken or out of place, different somehow, royalty mistakenly born into a family of peasants. The difference in your case is that it's true.”

“My belief in Jesus did not seem rational or scientific, and yet there was nothing I could do to separate myself from this belief. I think Laura was looking for something rational, because she believed that all things that were true were rational. But that isn't the case. Love, for example, is a true emotion, but it is not rational. What I mean is, people actually feel it. I have been in love, plenty of people have been in love, yet love cannot be proved scientifically, and yet we all believe in light and by light see all things. There are plenty of things that are true that don't make any sense. I think one of the problems Laura was having was that she wanted God to make sense. He doesn't. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant.”

“All my life I've felt like there was something wrong with me. Something missing or damaged.""Every teenager in the world feels like that, feels broken or out of place, different somehow, royalty mistakenly born into a family of peasants.”

“You're so privileged to be there, you feel like you have to complain about something just so you don't have to think about how lucky you are. It's kind of over compensation, I think, when I'm feeling generous about it. Or, when I'm not, I think maybe it's just the basic requirement of being a teenager, feeling like you have to be perfect every time, and when you have an algebra test or a hangnail, the rest of the war-torn, poverty-stricken, deformed world ought to turn its attention to you.”

“It was a major and deeply embarrassing teenage revelation. It must be how straight teenage boys feel when they realize those boobs they like have heads attached to them.”