Life is so much better with a friend.

I knew I could do it. I was strong and I was smart and I was a fighter. And I believed in myself.

I would just have to work harder than everyone else and prove myself to the skeptics, the way I always had, and simply refuse to take no for an answer.

There’s no such thing as immortality; all our striving is in vain. In the end, we’ll all be forgotten, every single one of us, the winners and the losers alike.

I owed that to myself, not to anyone else.

I think some part of me was always scared that I wasn’t going to wake up in the morning.

And who was I? I was nobody. A woman. A lowly bureaucrat. A doctor in quotation marks. It didn’t matter that I was better than he was—smarter and more competent and harder working and more dedicated to the kids. I couldn’t win. They wouldn’t let me.

The past is always looking over your shoulder, whispering things you don’t want to hear. You just have to ignore it until it goes away.

Usually I’m pretty good at that—moving forward, focusing on the task at hand—because you have to be, if you’re going to accomplish anything in this world.

You’re better than they are. Don’t ever forget that.

The truth is, we’re all prisoners of our historical context. Anybody who says morality is absolute, that right and wrong don’t change over time, you know what? They just haven’t lived long enough.

It was too quiet in the house, and the quiet would get him thinking, and then he’d start to spiral.

The other problem with believing you’re special is the shock that comes when you finally realize you’re not, that you’re just as fucked up as everyone else, if not worse.

I’d always been a party of one, set apart from the other kids by the conviction—I possessed it from a very early age—that I was destined for something bigger than they were, a future that mattered.

You can’t keep reading these stories, one after the other, all these high-achieving young women exploited by teachers and mentors and bosses, and keep clinging to the idea that your own case was unique. In fact, it had become pretty clear to me that that was how it worked—you got tricked into feeling more exceptional than you actually were, like the normal rules no longer applied.

I felt like an adult long before I came of legal age.