You don't know what you are.

Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the...

his own will always be seen as different

Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given, to be...

I floated. I had been part of something immense, but now I was torn loose. Broken away from the great purpose that had used me as a conduit. Useless. Again.

That she now had a kind of uniform and a set of tools made everything that much easier and much less about her particular feelings, for tasks requiring clothes and accoutrements were by definition...

...watching those damned dolls, thinking what a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women. Satin skin, silk hair, velvet eyes, sawdust heart - all complete.

You actually don't exist while you're in your bedroom, I say to the dog, so that she knows this important fact. Teenage girls in bedrooms aren't real.

I'm a liar. And I can't stop thinking about boys.

She would be no one if that was what it took. No one had no holes inside her.

But how could he admire Joyce's lengthy, libidinal 'yes' so fervently and end up saying 'no' to his own life? I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative...

What role was she expected to play in his life, and more important, in her own?

... she starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see ...

I am stained with corrupt splendor, I am a code for obscure secrets, I am a being apart, I was born in decadence, and I live over the water. I am as different as possible from you, and yet I am not...

All great autobiography is about loss, about the hopeless but necessary quest to retrieve and control a past that forever slips away. Memory is both inspiration and burden, method and subject, the...

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn't have to be...

Cut! Changes happen to people. But there is a face we sometimes have that hides itself.

All right, then, her first rule for the rest of her days: no more looking outside for definitions. She might not have any clue who she was, but better to be lost and searching than shoved into a...

For a long moment, they stood together in silence. Vader thought about his secret... about Thrawn's loyalty... about the Emperor's continued need for him. Perhaps the entire Empire's need for him......

Now he looked at her sideways. You don't think I look like a Shadowhunter anymore? Do you want to? Cristina asked. I want to look like my family, Mark said. I cannot have the Blackthorn coloring, but...

It is the mundanes who look at me and see something they do not understand - a boy who is not quite white and not quite foreign either." "Just as I am not human, and not demon either," Tessa said...

Love is a word, another kind of open. As the diamond comes into a knot of flame I am Black because I come from the earth's inside take my word for jewel in the open light.

are more like Dog and Cat and Bird than like Lassie and Fido and Spot. Therefore

It's true that, as my brother grew larger, he also grew dangerous, same as my sister. But they're still ours and we want them back. They're needed here at home.

At twenty - two, I had the callowest possible definition of interesting and, by the measure of my own calipers, was far from interesting myself.

I, Anna Maria de Burgh Coppinger Isis solemnly swear on

Luna was distant and elegant. The only time anyone had ever seen Luna angry was when someone called her 'African - American'. "I'm an American," she snapped, turning sharply towards the person. "I've...

A bastard son must fight his own way in the world. Osferth knew that.

By the time we hit the streets they were silent and closed in on us, and they had assumed the Nonchalant Look, an expression that said, I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor....

Perhaps it's that you can't go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are...