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Color fills her cheeks, and I think it again: that Johanna Reyes might still be beautiful. Except now I think that she isn't just beautiful in spite of the scar, she's somehow beautiful within it, like Lynn with her buzzed hair, like Tobias with the memories of his father's cruelty that he wears like armor, like my mother in her plain grey clothing.

People, I have discovered, are layers and layers of secrets. You believe you know them, that you understand them, but their motives are always hidden from you, buried in their own hearts. You will never know them, but sometimes you decide to trust them.

And here we begin to see one of the primary, paradoxical dialectics of hip: it is at once a negation of the aristocracy and an affirmation of it. Cool can't survive without the aristocrat

Humans are an image-conscious creation. It's quite pitiful, really, but it's just who we are. In truth, all cool is basically a perception of others --it can't exist as anything intrinsic or detached from public perception.

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.

Surely I will bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore