"She loves everything about her guitar- its weight against her body, the way the wood responds when her fingertips tap it, the strings that cut hard against her skin. The simple notes, the gentle riffs- it's all a wonderful game to her. She's fifteen years old and has already fallen in love many times, but her guitar will always be her first love." - beartown

"One day he'll take his mom away from here, he's sure of that. One day he'll stop adding and subtracting income and expenditures in his head all the time. There's an obvious difference between the children who live in homes where the money can run out and the ones who don't. How old you are when you realize that also makes a difference." - beartown

"...and she came to realize that things feel a whole lot better if you have a really good stereo in the car." - beartown

"All men have different fears that drive them, and Peter's biggest one is that he isn't good enough as a man, and not good enough as GM. He lost his parents and his firstborn child, and every morning he's terrified that he's going to loser Kira, Maya, and Leo. He couldn't bear losing his club as well." - beartown

"So Maya gives up and starts playing. Because Ana loves falling asleep to the sound of the guitar, and because Maya loves her. The last thing Maya thinks before she, too, falls asleep, with her headache and cough, is that it feels like she ought to spend the day in bed." - beartown

"'Panic attacks,' the psychologist said six months ago, and Kira never went back after that. She felt ashamed. As if life wasn't happy enough, as if she wasn't content, how could she possibly explain that to her family." - beartown

"Anxiety can act as internal gravity, shrinking the soul." - beartown

“People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem. Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots. We can talk about loss, we can treat it and give it time, but biology still forces us to live according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don’t heal, they die.” - beartown

"People say she's gone mad, because that's what people who know nothing about loneliness call it." - beartown

"Any living thing that is kept behind bars for long enough eventually becomes more scared of the unknown than its own captivity.” - beartown

“People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem. Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots. We can talk about loss, we can treat it and give it time, but biology still forces us to live according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don’t heal, they die.” - beartown

“Keep your trap shut when I’m talking! Fucking men! YOU’RE the problem! Religion doesn’t fight, guns don’t kill, and you need to be very fucking clear that hockey has never raped anyone! But do you know who do? Fight and kill and rape?” - beartown

“She will always be this to them now: at best the girl who got raped, at worst the girl who lied. They will never let her be anyone but that. In every room, on every street, in the supermarket and at the rink, she will walk in like an explosive device. They will be scared to touch her, even the ones who believe her, because they don’t want to risk getting hit by shrapnel when she detonates. They will back away in silence, turn in a different direction. They will wish that she would just disappear, that she had never been here. Not because they hate her, because they don’t, not all of them: they don’t all scrawl BITCH on her locker, they don’t all rape her, they aren’t all evil. But they’re all silent. Because that’s easier.” - beartown

“What an uncomfortable, terrible source of shame it is for the world that the victim is so often the one left with the most empathy for others." - beartown

“For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.” - beartown

“The most painful fall for anyone is tumbling down through a hierarchy." - beartown