God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will.

Sometimes you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read that book.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

Let's imagine a world where we don't celebrate Snooki and the Kardashians.

I know this is going to cost me, like, eight nerd points, but I don’t know anything about Pokemon.

I'm not interested in writing for adults. I like them as people! I don't like the way they publish books in that world. Nothing ever gets a chance.

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

The fourth way to get a boy to like you is to be yourself. Now, I am contractually obligated as an adult to give that advice, even though it doesn't work. But yeah, be yourself, even though no one has any idea what it means to be yourself. Like whose self would I otherwise be being?

Luck is for suckers.

The most important thing for a child to learn is that only some things can be imagined into reality. The most important thing for an adult to learn is that even if it doesn’t happen all the time, things DO get imagined into reality.

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.... You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.

Carbon. We’d be in trouble without it.

That's the thing about pain.... It demands to be felt.

The world is not a wish-granting factory.

The secret is that I'm really not that awesome. Much of what happens is that other people take their own awesome and kind of reflect it off of me, and so I appear awesome. But in fact, it is you who are creating almost all the awesome that you see in me (or in anyone else).

This is why we call people exes, I guess -- because the paths that cross in the middle end up separating at the end. It's too easy to see an X as a cross-out. It's not, because there's no way to cross out something like that. The X is a diagram of two paths.

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing it well or you're doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That is actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

I like trivia. I like the idea of trivia, that all of these weird and improbable things can still be true. Trivia reminds me of what is possible.

Mothers lie. It's in the job description.

The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.

I think inspiration is always around; it’s just a question of whether or not you’re noticing it.

What a slut time is. She screws everybody.

Love is the most common miracle.

I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?