It's Fun To Tease People About Where

... Suffering Does Not Ennoble. It Destroys. To Resist Destruction, Self-hatred, Or Lifelong Hopelessness, We Have To Throw Off The Conditioning Of Being Despised, The Fear Of Becoming The They That Is Talked About So Dismissively, To Refuse Lying Myths And Easy Moralities, To See Ourselves As Human, Flawed, And Extraordinary. All Of Us Extraordinary

The Worst Thing In The World Was The Way I Felt When I Wanted Us To Be Like The Families In The Books In The Library, When I Just Wanted Daddy Glen To Love Me Like The Father In Robinson Crusoe. (209)

It Has Seemed To Me That Literature, As I Meant It, Was Embattled, That It Was Increasingly Difficult To Find Writing Doing What I Thought Literature Should Do - Which Was Simply To Push People Into Changing Their Ideas About The World, And To Go Further, To Encourage Us In The Work Of Changing The World, To Making It More Just And More Truly Human.

Change, When It Comes, Cracks Everything Open.

I Wanted Her To To Go On Talking And Understand Without Me Saying Anything. I Wanted Her To Love Me Enough To Leave Him, To Pack Us Up And Take Us Away From Him, To Kill Him If Need Be. (107)