A human God. How preferable to an invisible God, I thought, one you’re not even sure exists. I was never taught basic math, but by the time I figured out how to finger count, I deduced that Charlie was around my age.

I guess people can’t be content without answers, even if they’re wrong. We’d rather have a lie than a question that we can never know the answer to.

I could tell he was afraid, but not for the immediate future. Not for that night. He was afraid for the rest of his life. That it would always be like this, living in that cabin with his father going slowly decrepit from homemade alcohol, getting meaner. I knew because it was the same fear I felt every day. Fear of being stuck in a place forever.

Everything in the universe comes from stars. Before anything else existed, there were just stars. Stars are like ovens,” she says. “Inside, they’re cooking planets and asteroids, and when they explode, out spews all this, like, space vomit that’s been cooking all these years. And solar systems formed, and Earth formed, and algae and eventually oxygen. And small organisms evolved into big animals and after about a billion years we came out, so that’s your answer. We come from the stars.

Belief shouldn’t be compatible with lies, but is.

She would tell me to never change for anyone, because the people you change for are the people who control you.

Jude taught me what love was: to be willing to hold on to another person’s pain. That’s it.

We’re stars who run off of stars.

Even after months of healing, it doesn’t take much to make me bleed.

Crime is never preventable because the mind will always grow bored.