“I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don't share their shit. They're like spoiled little ten-year-old bullies on the playground. They hog the monkey bars and the slide and the seesa...”

“They put me in a holding cell with a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid. We're the United Nations of juvenile delinquents.”

“I learned how to stop crying.I learned how to hide inside of myself.I learned how to be somebody else.I learned how to be cold and numb.”

“I'm dying from about ninety-nine kinds of shame”

“Some experiences are universal. A girl is a girl whether she lives in West Omaha or Sweet Valley. Books are often far more than books.”

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”

“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,And all the sweet serenity of books”

“Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.”

“Doing nothing is the hardest torture that a person can put himself through. For he is always brought face to face with his own self, which demands that he gives account for the sun which he useless...”

“We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it foreve...”

“Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.”

“Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?”