"A lot of people who read my novel 'Smog City' ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it's because I've given them life. Not literally of course, but since I spent so much time developing and creating my characters, they've ended up with complex personalities, in fact they're almost sentient in a way, and to write them off as dead would be like killing a close friend to me."

"Super 8 film is the language of silence."

"We get along like a house on fire these days."

"To exist as an interpreter of the law, you first have to follow that law yourself. Law is the glue that holds society together. It's flawed, but absolute, and corruption only hinders its progress."

"When I was in junior high school, I used to think that Disney's 1990's paranormal television program 'So Weird' was every kid's ideal life - not going to school, living on a tour bus, having rockstar parents, traveling all over North America and never staying in one place for more than a week or so. Of course, eventually the realization hits you that the kids out there who really do live like this, pulling up stakes every week and never staying with their friends or having a permanent residence, aren't really happy."

"Life is so funny sometimes that you just have to laugh."

"Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday."

"And what if you could go back in time and take all those hours of sorrow and insanity and replace them with something better?"

"I love the smell of old books, Mandy sighed, inhaling deeply with the book pressed against her face. The yellow pages smelled of wood and paper mills and mothballs."

"The child psychologist's clinic: where imaginary friends go to die, where dreams go to burn, where creativity goes to drown."

"Just because something isn't good doesn't mean it's bad."

"Capitalism has a way of letting people view the world through rose-coloured glasses."

"There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it, this place, she decided, was called Smog City."

"Money isn't everything. It's the only thing."

"Typical Pollution, they're always living in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"On Wall Street, Clarence was a diamond in a sea of glass, never greedy, never an ambulance-chaser, never the kind of person who deserved to die in the way that he did."

"I can't look people in the eye and tell them that they're going to die anymore."

"I'll remember you... I remember everyone I've lost."

"Mandy smiled cheerfully at an overweight kid in a gold sweater and pink skirt who was chasing her little brother around along the boardwalk. When she was that age, on sunny days she'd be out on the boardwalk with Jud and Wendy, buying rainbow sorbet from the ice cream shop and placing paper boats into the harbour. She felt like a ghost, drifting past the shell of her own childhood."

"People always say that digital cameras are much more stable than film cameras, but the truth is that digital cameras, or any kind of digital technology, is one of the most unstable things in the world. A film camera can last decades if you know how to look after it, but digital things can break down instantly. A violent storm, a nuclear bomb, even something as minor as a cracked screen or the releasing of newer models, can make a digital product just a block of useless metal."

"I used to want to be a cop for a brief time, a detective, solving crimes and upholding the law, ever since I stated watching crime shows in junior high. But being a cop, contrary to what many believe, isn't like the films or television shows that we see every day. If you're the cop who has to have the grim duty of telling a parent that their child was killed, or who loses their friend on a dangerous case, or who has to interview victims of horrible crimes, somehow I imagine that you just want to quit forever on some days."

"Your imaginary friend isn't the problem, Amanda. The problem is that you don't seem to have any real friends."

"There was nothing Mandy had wanted more than to give her full attention to the world of Personifications and ignore those who ignored her in society. She'd wanted to talk out loud to Alecto, to have conversations in front of other ordinary people. Unfortunately, to do that in front of ordinary people would only prove her insanity, and although Mandy was naA ve at times, she wasn't stupid."

"Alecto, do you think we have fallen from heaven, or do you think we are falling towards it?"

"He didn't remember the very first time he actually died very well. It wasn't as bad as remediation, but he remembered being afraid and worried and when he found himself alive again a few hours later with Mearth's wild green eyes peering down at him, he remembered still being afraid and worried. It was strange, he thought, to be afraid of being alive but being alive was worse than being dead in his mind."

"There's no reason that anything should ever become obsolete, whether it be VHS tapes, celluloid film, print books or even the previous versions of a computer operating system, as long as even just one person still wants them around. After all, one thing leads to another, old inventions are the basis for new ones, inventors and designers and scientists and hobbyists worked hard to create all these things, so don't they deserve some respect, enough not to have their ideas buried in the dust by the latest trends and fads?"

"Photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself."

"You're not exactly up for the Humanitarian of the Year award, so save your altruism for someone who can't see through you like cellophane."

"You don't understand," Alecto replied vacantly. "It isn't that I want to die... I just don't want to exist."

"I'll never buy a cell phone, I'd rather die than have a cell phones. Cell phones are the 21st century's ball and chain."

"A picture's worth a thousand words. But a single word can make you think of over a thousand pictures in your mind, over a thousand moments, a thousand memories."

"People say that a time machine can't be invented, but they've already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world's first time machines."

"Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took."

"These days we have Smartphones, Smartcars, Smartboards, Smarteverything, but consider this: if technology is getting smarter, does that mean humans are getting dumber?"

"Canada is a free country, after all."

"People are often wary of reading or watching anything in the horror genre because in their minds, it's just senseless gore, death and violence. Well, I can tell you from avid experience, that's not what horror is about. The horror genre teaches us that sometimes really bad things happen to really good people, but that hope always prevails in even the darkest of situations. That's a very important lesson, no matter how frightening you think the teacher is, and to be in the top of her class, all you need to do is to go in with an open mind."

"She shakily rushed towards the car to find Alecto casually standing beside it, smoking a cigarette and staring fixedly on the radio as it played the song 'Draggin' the Line' by Tommy James, his expression thoughtful. "What are you thinking about? Mandy questioned."Wouldn't the world be a very loud place to live if we said everything we thought? Alecto asked quietly."

"Truthfully she felt incredibly miserable, seeing university students and tourists bustling in and out of the place with their cell phones in hand, texting like there was no tomorrow. Living behind a screen, they'd likely text with their last breath."

"Where did the stereotypical image of the reclusive author in a bathrobe and slippers, indulging in vices and spending hours before a typewriter, even come from? I don't know about you, but most writers don't have the luxury of doing any of this. Otherwise we'd have no life experience and nothing to write about, anyway."

"Why do they lie? she asked herself aloud. "They say time makes losing someone you loved easier to deal with, but it only makes it worse."

"Why hoard away so many back-issues of People Magazine? Fashion magazines are just empty promises. You can go bankrupt blowing all your cash on expensive beauty products, but the only way you'll ever look just like the people on those glossy front covers is if you know how to use computer editing software for photographs. Besides, people who think they are ugly, are never really all that ugly anyway. People who think they are pretty, are rarely ever all that pretty."

"If I hear the phrase "selfie" one more time, I'll have to enroll myself in anger management classes."

"There are some things in the past that, that just aren't meant to be viewed."

"Mandy was thinking back to when she was five years old, when she, her parents and Jud went outside before Christmas and had a snowball fight with the gray snow of Sydney Mines. "This is a wicked blast, Jud would say, and Mandy would snap photos with a 35mm disposable film camera, photos she wished very much she could step into sometimes."

"More pathetic than the digital age is the people who love it. They buy right into the "newer is always better" ideology and they can't seem to grasp that the fun of VHS tapes, super 8 film, darkroom photography and vinyl records is far more worthwhile and human than the cold, high-tech atmosphere of everything being digitized. As the 21st century progresses, yeah, we'll have our Netflix and our cellular phones and our artificial intelligence and our implanted microchips - and future generations will have lost something valuable. Sadly, they won't even know what they've lost because we're taking it all away from them."

"You have more issues than Reader's Digest."

"What's supposed to be and what is, are two very different things."

"Wendy's house, unlike many in Cape Breton, had three floors, along with a basement and attic. Aside from Wendy's bedroom, there was a laundry room. The dirty water in the sink would rush from the washer hose, bubbling up, threatening to overflow, but it never did. Next-door was a motel with a neon sign that read in turquoise and pink, "We have the best rates in town!, but the 'E' in 'rates' kept flickering on and off day and night so that every few seconds it would switch to, "We have the best rats in town!"

"Geraldine keeps her eyes trained on him as she slowly reaches into her purse, wrapping her fingers around her gun. “Callo, I'm so sorry that your life ended up this way,” she sighs as she gets out of her side of the car, her feet burning from the cold as her high heels sink into the fallen snow. “Aren't you scared?”
"I'm you, Geraldine— I fell into the same trap as you, anyway,” Callo answers. His large eyes are shining with tears, but he doesn't seem afraid in the least. “The dead don't feel anything, you know— not even guilt or regret. So, what is there to be afraid of?”

"Newspapers take peoples' tragedies and force the world to experience all of it."