Books

"When you haven’t been in the world long, it’s hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don’t even feel the need to. Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don’t want to think about the rest. Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this Papa, this is day, this is night."

"Be careful of people who feel weak, I think. Because it's possible that one day they'll want to feel strong and you'll never recover from it. Maybe that's a thought to add to my file."

I looked at her and I could see she was reading me, seeing how the conversation with Jim had gone, getting everything she needed to know—the words were just her playing for time. Since meeting Tyler I’d believed that a psychic connection between human beings was possible. ‘Kinship’ is the best word in English for it. The French call it une affinité profonde, which I also like it but it still doesn’t quite get there. It’s that doppelgänger effect that can go either way: to mutual understanding or mutual destruction.

Everything I wanted and tons of opportunities were in front of my face, but I didn’t understand how to take them. On Gchat I told my dad I was having a hard time, and he said, Anywhere is a prison if you let it be.

"I was thinking: Girls get scared way too often. Girls get stupidly scared. I was not scared. Telling myself not to be scared kind of worked. "