“Sometimes a book isn't a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.Sometimes it's the only story you knew how to tell.”

“Life is a bleak place. Sometimes you have to learn how to shoot first.”

“Juliette, please, tell me what I'm supposed to do. How am I supposed to feel? It's one shitty thing right after another and I'm trying to be okay--God, I'm trying so hard but it's really freaking difficult and I miss--I miss you, I miss you so much it's killing me.”

“Someone picked up the sun and pinned it to the sky again, but every day it hangs a little lower than the day before. It's like a negligent parent who only knows one half of who you are. It never sees how its absence changes people. How different we are in the dark.”

“Sometimes I wonder about glue.No one ever stops to ask glue how it’s holding up. If it’s tired of sticking things together or worried about falling apart or wondering how it will pay its bills next week.”

“Sometimes I close my eyes and paint these walls a different color. I imagine I’m wearing warm socks and sitting by a fire. I imagine someone’s given me a book to read, a story to take me away form the torture of my own mind. I want to be someone else somewhere else with something else to fill my mind. I want to run, to feel the wind tug at my hair. I want to pretend that this is just a story within a story. That this cell is just a scene, that these hands don’t belong to me, that this window leads to somewhere beautiful if only I could break it. I pretend this pillow is clean, I pretend this bed is soft. I pretend and pretend and pretend until the world becomes so breathtaking behind my eyelids that I can no longer contain it. But then my eyes fly open and I’m caught around the throat by a pair of hands that won’t stop suffocating suffocating suffocating. My thoughts, I think, will soon be sound. My mind, I hope, will soon be found.”

“I don't know much about anything in this world but I do know how to read the book written in his eyes.”