Bonnie

“Some kids really don’t have much Me at all. They truly are part of the group. But a lot of them just act—pretend—the way I tried to. Their heart isn’t really in the groups, but still they get along, they get by. I wish I could. I honestly wish I could be a good hypocrite. It doesn’t hurt anybody, and it sure makes life easier. But I never could fool anybody. They knew I wasn’t interested in what interested them, and they despised me for it, and I despised them for despising me. But then I also despised the few kids who didn’t try to go along.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

“But you left; you had to. Because you knew, if they didn’t, that Jeff Kerwin, Junior, wasn’t the boy they loved. Probably, if it came to that, the first Jeff Kerwin, your father, hadn’t been that boy either, and that was why he had left. They loved something they had made up for themselves and called their son, and perhaps, you thought, they’d even be happier with memories and no real boy around to destroy that image of their perfect son.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Bloody Sun

“Though I myself have come to this safe harbour – if safety can be found in this life – yet I mourn my former simple days. I have lost my Innocence, in more ways than one. I have seen the gears and furious machinery of the world that lies unreckoned beneath our feet. No longer can I note, as other men do, the passing hours upon the heavens' gilded face, without a vision of a hidden master-spring uncoiling to its final silence. I await the day when all clocks shall stop, including the one that ticks within my breast. Do thou the same, Reader, and profit from my example.”
― K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices

“Here in the US we used to go on about our "First World problems." Nobody's pretending folks wouldn't be worse off if a storm like Luna had made landfall in Dhaka or Lagos. But the point is, it hit here, twice in ten days. And when the choice is between nothing and something, most folks will settle for a tent and three squares any day. Situation like that, your so-called First World gets real small, real fast.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Displacements