“The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself”

Rooms are a fixed size, which can’t be altered without pulling down walls and building new ones.

When you are in your teenage years you are consciously experiencing everything for the first time, so adolescent stories are all beginnings. There are never any endings.

If a boy, if a man, asks you if you’re all right and you say yes, he’ll always believe you and get on with what he wants to do. It’s just the way they’re made.

Fame, money and the size of the market are not very important to me. What is, is writing a book that is worth doing and then publishing it.

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is.

Like just now. Like now. How is it possible? Can you love someone more and more and at the same time, all the time, love them as much as it’s possible to love someone?

There are times when you want to be what you have never allowed yourself to be before.

They should be unchanging in shape and proportions. But sometimes they do change depending on who’s in them.

You have to know your own truth and stick to it. And never despair. Never give up. There’s always hope.

How do I think of you? As someone I want to be with. As someone as young as me, but “older,” if that makes sense. As someone I like to look at, not just because you’re good to look at, but because just looking at you makes me smile and feel happier.

Even if they’re saying your name with dislike, at least you know you’re you, that you exist.

A joy that hurts with sadness a sadness that is pleasurable a pleasure full of terror a terror that excites an excitement that calms a calmness that frightens.

I don’t actually think “true love” is such a good term because love can only be true. If it isn’t true it can’t be love.

Doing anything when you’re bored is very very boring. Anyway, doing nothing is the point of being bored.

Yet, isn’t it strange, isn’t it weird, how we can KNOW that someone is not behaving in the way we imagine, and at the same time we can be totally convinced that he is!

There are times when you don’t know yourself. There are times when you don’t want to know yourself.