“why is it so hard when i have to but so easy when i want to”

“She stole my dreams. I wanted to show her I can survive and now that won't happen”

“I always liked that time of day, when people were shutting up their shops, putting the town to bed for the night, going home to do normal stuff with their normal families. I wonder if they got to enjoy being normal, to know just how terrific it was, or whether it was just invisible to them like air? Sometimes I got so pissed off at how easy the normal people had it that I just wanted to walk down the street shaking them and screaming into their squishy self-satisfied faces.”

“As a Jew, I had no desire to challenge my childhood prejudice. But as a teacher, I could not do otherwise.”

“When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?”

“I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.”

“When hope is all around you, it's hard to be down!”