“Kat and Will must have been quietly plotting their escape for years, and I'd been so intent on making sure that their homework was done and their desks were tidy and their shoelaces tied that I'd missed all the signs.”

“She was mine, had always been, and I'd always been hers. Despite what I'd done, the wounds I'd inflicted, she had always been mine.... our hearts had been tied, our bond one that neither of us could ever escape.”

“More than anything in this world, I wish I had been born rich. It would have made up for everything. I'd still be ugly, sure, but I'd be rich and ugly. I'd still be weak and dim and tongue-tied with women, but I'd be rich enough for them not to care. I'd no longer be a social misfit, I'd be eccentric. And most of all, I'd no longer be what I was, I'd be something different.”

“As a child, what I was missing was so much bigger to me than what I had. My mother-mythic, imaginary-was a deity and a superhero and a comfort all at once. If only I'd had her, surely, she would have been the answer to every problem; if only I'd had her , she would have been the cure for everything that ever had gone wrong in my life.”

“Of course I wasn't abused. If I were; things would be so simple. I'd have a reason to for being in a shrinks office. I'd have a justification and something to work on. The world wasn't going to give me something that tidy.”

“After all that I'd been through, after all that I'd learned and all that I'd been given, I was going to do what I had been doing every day for the last few years now: just show up and do the best that I could do with whatever lay in front of me.”