“Sticks and stones keep breaking my bones but these words, these words will kill me.”

“My words wear no parachutes as they fall out of my mouth.”

“I've searched the world for all the right words and my mouth is full of nothing.”

“They locked me up with a boy. A boy . Dear god. They're trying to kill me. They've done it one purpose. To torture me, to torment me, to keep me from sleeping through the night ever again.”

“I bite back a shiver as the blood rushes up to blush my cheeks and for a moment, just for this moment, I drop my bones and allow him to hold me together.”

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”

“The books...they helped keep me from losing my mind altogether.”