"I can't believe I said it out loud. The truth doesn't set you free, you know. It makes you feel awkward and embarrassed and defenseless and red in the face and horrified and petrified and vulnerable. But free? I don't feel free. I feel like shit."

"It's like you have a plan and someone comes along and makes you want to change it all, but you still like your first plan, no matter how fantastic the second one makes you feel."

"His voice is deep and gravelly. I once heard one of the girls say that he had the voice of a sex god, but because I've never really heard what a sex god sounds like, I can't verify that."

"A different Australia emerged in the 1950s. A multicultural one, and 30 years on we're still trying to fit in as ethnics and we're still trying to fit the ethnics in as Australians."

"Do you love me?' he asked instead. 'Because if you don't, I'd wait until you did. I'd wait weeks and months and years."

"I've been waiting for you all night and day,' she said.Froi shivered. He realised that the words came from Quintana the ice maiden. Realised, as he felt his face heating up, that the idea of this Quintana waiting for him with excitement spoke to parts of him he believed to be dormant. And then she winked.'Did I do that right?' she asked. Her smile was lopsided and he saw a glimpse of the teeth.And Froi imagined that he would follow her to the ends of the earth."

"When it was over, she gathered him in her arms. And told him the terrible irony of her life.That she had wanted to be dead all those years while her brother had been alive. That had been her sin.And this was her penance.Wanting to live when everyone else seemed dead."

"He hesitated, remembering something Finnikin had said to him on their journey. That somehow, even in the worst of times, the tiniest fragments of good survive. It was the grip in which one held those fragments that counted."