“If I’d stopped believing that my life would eventually get better, I don’t think I would have survived high school.”

“School sucks. I'm dropping out and becoming a truck stop waitress. I think i'll change my name to Flo and get a really bad perm. Flo the truck stop waitress with a bad perm doesn't need high school. She lives off the knowledge of life.”

“Every now and then, I’d meet a guy and think that we were getting along great, and suddenly I’d stop hearing from him. Not only did he stop calling, but if I happened to bump into him sometime later he always acted like I had the plague. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t. And it bothered me. It hurt me. With time, it got harder and harder to keep blaming the guys, and I eventually came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with me. That maybe I was simply meant to live my life alone.”

“If I didn't have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.”

“... the voice of the Dreamer convinced me that 'later' would always be better than 'now', that 'someday' is where life will really happen and high school is just something we have to get through before we can live our real lives.”

“I’d always enjoyed life, and I knew I would again. But I was going to have to slog through a lot of bad patches to get there”