You know how you’re supposed to come up with a list of ‘resolutions’ at the beginning of the year to try to make yourself a better person? Well, the problem is, it’s not easy for me to think of ways to improve myself, because I’m already pretty much one of the best people I know.

We live in a world where we rarely speak out and when someone does, often nobody is there to listen.

When I’m away from him, all I can do is think about him. I’ll run over and over in my head the sweet things he’s said to me, the times he’s touched me. But when it seems like a chance comes up for something to really happen, I’m the one who stops it. I’ll just start talking a mile a minute or laughing or something. And it seems crazy, y’know? Because I’ve been obsessing over him for months. But I just can’t get myself to go through with it. Maybe it’s because I’ve started noticing he’s not perfect.

Finally I just got to the point where I stopped caring what other people thought about me. That makes everything easier. You still feel alone, but it doesn’t bother you anymore.

The problem with hanging out with one best friend all the time is that when you get in a fight, you suddenly realize you have no other friends.

Around Josie, I went out of my way to pretend I didn’t like him. If I acted like I didn’t like him, then eventually it would be the truth. Crushes were temporary things, like the flu. You just had to live through them.

The sadness of summer coming to an end, even though mine only just started. That’s how things go when you get older, I guess. Summers matter less and less, until you turn into a grown-up and they disappear entirely.

When I was a kid, I drew clouds that looked like the bodies of cartoon sheep. The sun was a perfect yellow circle. Birds flew in flocks of little black Vs. And I made sure there was always a rainbow. It’s too bad the sky doesn’t actually look like that. In a way, the real thing is sort of a letdown.

There are just some kind of men who—who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live this one, and you look down the street and see the results.

She accused me of hiding from life in books and harboring strange obsessions and staying at home all the time to torture my poor parents, who are the only people who can’t legally get away from me.

How wonderful to be alive. But why does it always have to be so painful?

For as long as he could remember, he had never ceased to wonder how it was that a human being with arms and legs like everyone else, and with a different language and way of life common to all the rest, could be so different—a being liked by so few and loved by no one. He could not understand how it was that if you were worse than other people you could not improve by trying.

Nothing new there, but now it really bugged me. Like all of a sudden I didn’t fit in anywhere. Not at school, not at home… and every time I turned around, another person I’d known forever felt like a stranger to me. Even I felt like a stranger to me.

It’s easy to look back and see it, and it’s easy to give the advice, but the sad fact is, most people don’t look beneath the surface until it’s too late.

One’s character is set at an early age, son. The choices you make now will affect you for the rest of your life. I hate to see you swim out so far you can’t swim back.