"Do you always handle pain like this?" she says. "By trying to make others uncomfortable?"

I would have pitied any adult who told me that things would change. For you, I would have thought, but not for us.

When you were an adult, all the promises of your life was foreclosed upon, every day just a series of compromises mitigated by little pleasures that distracted you from your former wildness, from your truth. Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Edie Sedwick, Janis Joplin. They got to be beautiful forever.

When you grow up, who you were as a teenager either takes on a mythical importance or it's completely laughable.

At fifteen, the world ended over and over and over again. To be so young is a kind of self-violence. No foresight, an inflated sense of wisdom, and yet you're still responsible for your mistakes.

To the moment before I tasted alcohol, to virginity and not really knowing that things die, back to believing that something great is up ahead, back to before I made the choices that would hem me in to the life I live now.

I want to go home, but what I mean, what I'm grasping for, is not a place, it's a feeling. I want to go back. But back where?

Privilege is something to be aware of, to fight to see beyond, but ultimateley to be grateful for. It's like a bulletproof vest; it makes you harder to kill.

At fifteen, I believed that I would grow up to be the exception to every rule.

Tell me what you can't forget, and I'll tell you who you are.

My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That's just how it is. Grief and love is cojoined, you don't get one without the other.

There's not one truth ever, just a whole bunch of stories, all going at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other. It's all a beautiful calamitous mess.

All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw [...] I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns.

People always talk like there's a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn't, at least not for me. I remember what I've imagined and imagine what I remember.

Our hearts were broken in the same places. That's something like love, but maybe not the quite the thing itself.

Every loss is unprecedented. You can't ever know someone else's hurt, not really - just like touching someone else's body isn't the same as having someone else's body.

I guess at some point, you realize whoever takes care of you is just a person, and that they have no superpowers and can't actually protect you from getting hurt.

You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.

Even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching the whole thing from somewhere else, like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it.

The thing is, when you lose someone, you realize you'll eventually lose everyone.