“I've been through so many meetings and partings. They were like a heavy secret, but when I started to talk about them, they seemed to sparkle... I couldn't put them into words.”

“So yes, get prepared, but don't "be first"—don't start talking about *us* and *them* already, because then you're making *them* into the *other*, and that's when the shooting starts. Far too many of the survival books I've read go there, way too early. You're becoming part of the problem; you're not the hero, you're the bad guy. It's all *us*.”

“So many times it seemed like there were chances to stop things before they started. Or even stop them in midstream. But it was even worse when you knew in that very moment that there was still time to save yourself, and yet you couldn't even budge.”

“The worst part was that I had things I wanted to tell my mother, too many to count, but none of them would go down so easy. She'd been through too much, between my siters-I could not add to the weight. So instead, I did my best to balance it out, bit by bit, word by word, story by story, even if none of them were true.”

“I began doing my own research into Wicca, reading about it and even meeting a group of local teens who were followers of the religion. They were a good source of information, but I couldn't stand being around them. They were all extremely flaky and melodramatic. I felt embarrassed for them, as they didn't have the sense to realize how socially inept they were. Wicca is a beautiful religion in theory, but I distanced myself from anything to do with it because I couldn't take the people. Many of them are people in their thirties who still try to live and behave like teenagers. Wicca seems to draw a great many people who cannot or will not grow up.”

“When I first started studying Greek, one of my absolute favorite parts was realizing that so many English words had these old, secret roots. Learning Greek was like being given a super-power: linguistic x-ray vision.”