"This is what happens when you try to help people. You get screwed."

"He believed in people. He believed that if people could only be shown the right way-the way to health and order, a way to be free of unhappiness-they would make the right choice. They would obey."

"Not gray, exactly. Right before the sun rises there's a moment when the whole sky goes this pale nothing color-not really gray but sort of, or sort of white, and I've always really liked it because it reminds me of waiting for something good to happen."

"When I got home, my roof was gone. Overnight the weight of the snow became too much to carry. What tipped the scale? Think about it: there must have been a final snowflake that did it, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a milligram that made all the difference."

"No guest rooms. I shake my head resolutely. "I want to be in a room room. A lived-in room."

"I love you. Remember. They cannot take it."

"Don't you get it? You can't tell me what to feel."

"Music, I think, he makes me feel like music."

"Of course. That's what people do in a disordered world, a world of freedom and choice: they leave when they want. They disappear, they come back, they leave again. And you are left to pick up the pieces on your own."

"Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness."

"She lives for this-the fight, the battle for survival. She actually enjoys it."

"Everything in me feels fluttering and free, like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music."

"If you're smart, you care. And if you care, you love."

"Stop your idiocy, Sandra, please. For once in your death."

"Time waits for no man, but progress waits for man to inact it."

"I thought if I followed the rules, things would turn out all right. that's the thing about the cure, isn't it? It isn't just about deliria at all. It's about order. A path for everyone. You just have to follow it and everything will be okay. That's what the DFA is about. That's what I belevied in-what I've had to believe in. Because otherwise, it's just...chaos."

"This is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people habe a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester."

"He Is looking at me through the smoke, across the fence. He never takes his eyes off me. His hair Is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent If we had ten thousand billion years."

"He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief."

"You can't cheat if there are no rules."

"They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that's not how it happened for me."

"I guess that's what saying good-bye is always like--like jumping off an edge. The worst part is making the choice to do it. Once you're in the air, there's nothing you can do but let go."

"Sometimes day and night reverse. Sometimes up goes down and down goes up, and love turns into hate, and the things you counted on get washed out from under your feet, leaving you pedaling in the air. Sometimes people stop loving you. And that's the kind of darkness that never gets fixed, no matter how many moons rise again, filling the sky with a weak approximation of light."

"I hate skin, I hate bones and bodies. I want to curl up inside of him and be carried there forever."

"I've learned to get really good at this - say one thing when I'm thinking about something else, act like I'm listening when I'm not, pretend to be calm and happy when I'm really freaking out. It's one of the skills you perfect as you get older."

"I was going to tell you that you look beautiful with your hair down. That's all I was going to say."

"That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt."

"I'd never undetstood how Hana Could lie so often and easily. But just like anyhting else, lying becomes easier the more you do it."

"An itchy feeling began to work its way through my body, as though a thousand mosquitoes were circulating through my blood, biting me from the inside, making me want to scream, jump, squirm. I ran."

"Every choice is limited. That's life."

"The alchemist was dazed and dumbfounded, as the true meaning of the magic was revealed: *The dead will rise from glade to glen and ancient will be young again*. The dead had, after all, risen. From dead and dry things there was growth, and new life everywhere. And the endlessly long winter had at last turned to spring. From life to death and back again to life. It was indeed the greatest magic in the world."

"Everything else is nothing."

"And for a moment, for a split second, everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own."

"But maybe you carried your demons with you everywhere, the way you carried your shadow."

"Suicide. A sideways word, a word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms or murmured behind closed doors. It was only in dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed."

"He and I have a head-nod friendship, since that's pretty much the limit of our interaction."

"Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense."

"And now I realize Lindsay's not fearless. She's terrified. She's terrified that people will find out she's faking, bullshitting her way through life, pretending to have everything together when really she's just floundering like the rest of us. Lindsay, who will bite at you if you even look in her direction the wrong way, like on of those tiny attack dogs that are always barking and snapping in the air before they're jerked backward on the chains that keep them in one place."

"And there it is: Even though we're standing in the same patch of sun-drenched pavement, we might as well be a hundred thousand miles apart."

"If they really want us to be happy, they'd let us pick ourselves."

"I don't know which is worse: that I'm home and so much is different, or that I'm home and so much feels the same."

"Now I'd rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie."

"I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him."

"Now, after so many years, I understand what the Coldness was and where it came from-this sense that everything is lost, and worthless, and meaningless."

"Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe."

"It's weird how much people change...It's kind of sad, if you think about it. Like there's no continuity in people at all. Like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you're no longer a kid but a "young adult", and after that you're a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one."

"In my dream I know I am falling. But there is no up or down, no walls or sides or ceilings, just the sensation of cold and darkness everywhere. I am so scared I could scream. But when I open my mouth, nothing happens. And I wonder if you fall forever and never touch down, is it really still falling? I think I will fall forever."

"Is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserve to die? So bad I deserved to die like that?I what I did really so much worse than waht anybody else does?Is it really so much worse than what you do?Think about it."

"This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you. This is half the reason for the cure: It clean-sweeps; it makes the past, and all its pain, distant, like the barest impression on sparkling glass.But the cure works differently for everybody; and it does not work perfectly for all."

"Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind."