"There's a difference between living and just surviving. Do something you love, and find someone to love who loves that you love what you do.It is really that simple.And that hard."

"This man was being kept alive by those machines. Someone was trying to help him. They were just trying to help. All the horrible things we've seen are just people trying to help, aren't they? To make the work a little easier, and the world a little easier for people to live in. And it turned into a nightmare."

"Jack, I’m just telling you, if it turns out. . .I want you to shoot me.”“Dee—”'I’m not kidding, not exaggerating, just telling you that I do not have it in me to handle that.”“You have a daughter, too. You don’t have the luxury not to handle shit."

"Etta saw the way Sophia took a deep breathe, set her shoulders back, and moved with practiced grace on her way out — and she understood something about the other girl, truly understood for the first time. Sophia wanted it, when she was only ever sent out."

"When I came home, I was asked to put my pictures in a photo exhibit at the Cinematography College ... My pictures won first prize. I began to ask myself what I was doing, and why. A few months after the exhibit, I dropped out of college, left my wife and began to write this book."

"He could have killed me for the blunder— which really wasn’t my fault— but I was lucky , and he gave me another chance. The two officers who questioned him were also incredibly lucky for not having had any idea who it was they’d been questioning."

"In simple, the past is a time gone by and no longer exists in the present moment, but we choose to allow this past to occupy our minds, our bodies and our very existence."

"Before I shall have become a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time. What they say or do will be of little matter, for they will bring only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness."

"All of the narration in 'Smile' is first-person. Most of the books that I grew up reading had first-person narrators for some reason. My diaries were written in this voice, and since this story is autobiographical, it just felt like a natural extension."