“I felt indestructible, or at least undestroyed, more alive than I'd ever been.”

“And I am ashamed to write here that I felt more alive than ever, even though my heart was broken glass in my chest.”

“Sometimes I think I'd rather be frightened than bored. At least when you're frightened you know you're alive.”

“...[She] felt as if she were both a stranger to herself and more herself than she'd ever been.”

“And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.”

“My mother has always been the point I calibrated myself against. In knowing where she was, I could always locate myself, as well. These months she'd been gone, I felt like I'd been floating, loose and boundaryless, but now that I knew where she was, I kept waiting for a kind of certainty to kick in. It didn't. Instead, I was more unsure than ever, stuck between this new life and the one I'd left behind.”