“I guess there's a Use By date when it comes to blaming your parents for how messed up you are.I guess that's what turning eighteen means.Time to own it.”

“This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think, will have MAD stamped across it.”

“If I look closely I can see we have the same colour eyes, not me and Simon, but me and the boy who is also me, the boy who I can no longer recognise, with whom I no longer share a single thought, w...”

“I don't want the world to keep turning without me on it.”

“We are selfish, my illness and I. We think only of ourselves. We shape the world around us into messages, into secret whispers spoken only for us.”

“Any punishment is an insult to the crime”

“If you expect great things of yourself and demand little of others, youll keep resentment far away.”

“There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations”

“One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.' To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: 'This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.”

“I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about i...”

“Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be r...”

“I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are goin...”

“You have to stretch your soul to find your potential strength.”

“All we are not stares back at what we are.”

“We must become what we wish to teach.”