“Well, kids are never much on history. Nor for that matter was anybody else. It had been MacAllister’s experience that most people think anything that happened before they were born didn’t count for a whole lot.”

“I'd been in hairier situations than this one. Actually, it's sort of depressing, thinking how many times I'd been in them. But if experience had taught me anything, it was this: No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse.”

“History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.”

“But its not funny. Not to people who've been told they're losers their whole lives and believe they will never be anything else.”

“Anything might have been anything else and had as much meaning to it.”

“There’s never been an act done since the beginning, from a kid stealing candy to a dictator committing genocide, that the person doing it didn’t think he was fully justified. That’s a mental trick called rationalizing, and it’s done the human race more harm than anything else you can name.”

“It’s not a matter of imaging, despite what a lot of people would feel that it is. I’ve never presented myself in a way that I don’t feel comfortable with; I’ve never presented myself in a way to appeal to anybody. For the most part the way I’ve always looked to not appeal to most people. Really, my aesthetic was really more of a terrorism or violence than it was something to attract; more of a representation of my detachment than anything else — though it’s not always a very conscious thing.”

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”

“For me, it was almost like winter didn’t count. Summer was what mattered. My whole life was measured in summers.”

“And yet, anything real, anything strong, was never easy. She'd been taught from an early age that the things that mattered most were the hardest to obtain.”