“BE QUIET!!...What do you want...? I was in the middle of saying something nice...”

“Coldness settles again in my stomach. I do not want a nice Hmong girl. I want a nice Egyptian boy who teaches me about colors and makes me appreciate poetry. I want the nice Egyptian boy who stops in the middle of the day to say "Thank you, God. For everything.”

“I'm surprised you know that," I say quietly, " since you left halfway through my one and only fight." "It wasn't something I wanted to watch." he says. What's that supposed to mean?”

“If it's true, does it have to be nice? If you have something true to say, but you don't say it because you just want to be nice, isn't that sort of like a lie?”

“I don't do what I'm told, but I might do what you want if you ask me nicely.”

“The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself "Oh now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home. And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.”