"I think we ought to find something else to do, said Mandy. "But Alecto my love, you're the first person to notice my retro diner kitchen. When my parents saw it, they thought I was creating a weird art project."I like it. It's got that let's-drown-ourselves-in-better-days type ambiance, Alecto declared, his gray eyes narrowed."

"Dreams are just lies that we tell ourselves while we're asleep."

"There's a good reason for everything, ain't there?"

"She dug into one of the boxes, finding clay angels she'd made in art class when she was seven years old. She found plastic swans on strings and red crystal cardinals. She found a blue-and-white rocking horse covered in glitter. She found a porcelain Santa Claus. She found that she couldn't figure out where the hell time had gone."

"There's always one sure way of finding out that you're a misfit. When you're eleven years old, and your friends are telling you that they just sneaked into the theater to watch 'Twilight' and that it was "sooooo emotional and sooooo terrifying and soooooo romantic!" - but you've been spending the summer watching 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'Don't Look Now' and knowing the lines to all the Alfred Hitchcock films by heart - that's the moment you realize that you're a misfit."

"Smile for the camera, pretty little Sydney Tar Ponds."

"Friends are like the stars that glow in the sky... you don't always see them, but you know they're always there overhead, and even when it's cloudy, snowy or stormy, even when the power goes out and you're trapped in darkness, they'll always find a way to shine through to you."

"Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses."

"Terrell is weeping soundlessly, and despite the guard's objection, he raises his hand up to the glass. Geraldine mimics him, lining her fingers up with his. It's lonely to think that one little sheet of glass could create such a thick distance between them, but all the same, regardless of what he's done, he's still one of the closest friends she has."

“Mandy, I hardly think this was appropriate, not after—you know—after the funeral. We haven't had the money for any of your weird little games, and I was hoping you'd be more mature now that Jud's gone,” her father had added disappointedly.
“How much'd that cake cost you?”
“It's paid for,” Mandy had argued, but her voice had sounded tiny in the harbour wind. “I used the cash from my summer job at Frenchy's last year, and I—it was my birthday, Dad!”
“You can't even be normal about this one thing, can you?” her father had complained.
Mandy hadn't cried; she'd only stared back knowingly, her voice shaky. “I'm normal.”

"This is my home, Cape Breton is my home, and I don't know if I really want to leave it as much as I might think and I'm sort of scared to leave it all behind, everything I've lived with, I have so many memories of all the things I've done here and I'm afraid if I leave, I might lose all my memories."

"Bernie believed in God. He believed that God wanted people to enjoy life to the fullest, not drench themselves in aversion and prejudice."

"I don't like psychiatrists, Alecto told her. "Not because they don't think I'm real, but because they have no idea what they're doing."

"Mandy would much rather have imaginary friends who were real than real friends who were imaginary."

"One of the many downsides to being a drug addict is never really knowing if the stuff is real."

"Nobody really wants to be your friend when they discover that you work with dead people."

"Amanda, you finally decided to answer the phone, her mom exclaimed after picking up at the first ring. "Where've you been, what've you been up to?"Mom, do you remember when I was a kid, I had a friend, he was a Personification of the Sydney Tar Ponds, sort of my imaginary friend? Mandy asked."No, what in the name of god are you on about? her mom sighed in exasperation."Remember? Only I could see him, but he was real and he was my best friend when I was eighteen? Mandy insisted."No, I don't remember Alecto Sydney Steele at all, said her mom all too quickly."

"Her latest client is Professor Desmond Curnin, a university professor who teaches library sciences to large groups of students. He's quick to pay on-time, quick to never fall behind. He's a brown-haired man with an unkempt beard and thick-framed hipster glasses. He slides a leather briefcase stuffed with dollar bills into the open window of Geraldine's car. "Your fly's unzipped, Geraldine points out, disgusted. "Who gave you a license to sell hot dogs, buddy?"

"I've seen how cigarettes went from being advertised in every type of media to being something found to be deadly; they can't kill me no matter how many of them I smoke but I've seen humans die from smoking them; if I were you I would stop smoking them."Why should I? You smoke 'em all the time, you chain-smoke cigarettes, Mandy pointed out."Yeah, I started doing that back in the Sixties, for reasons you likely saw on those VHS tapes, but I'm not a person, I'm Pollution, things like that aren't dangerous to me but they are to you, Alecto told her. "It's not a good idea."

"Alecto Sydney Steele, an entity of few words whom society managed to overlook as it rapidly dove into the 21st century. Everything about him, his interests, his friends, his own life, was constantly in danger of becoming an anachronism. And caught up in that mess was Mearth, not exactly evil in nature but just misunderstood. A very long time ago Alecto's life had been all incandescent sparkles and Kodachrome, but that was before the environmental movement changed Mearth from a perfectly nice and kind guardian, to a deranged and malevolent monster."

"Maybe a holiday miracle will change Mearth's awful behavior, Mandy suggested with optimism."The only holiday miracle around here is that Mearth hasn't murdered us both yet, said Alecto, lighting another cigarette, his hands shaking erratically. He looked exhausted and terrified, his gray eyes soulless."Do you know what Mearth likes, Alecto? Mandy questioned."Vegetables, she likes celery a lot, and lettuce, Alecto responded in a quiet monotone. "I don't know what else she likes. I've never asked her."Well, she has to like something, doesn't everyone?"Not her, Mandy Valems."

"Cell phones are certainly not necessary, and "but I'm from the digital age, this is what everyone in my generation is doing!" isn't a very good excuse for being hooked on a glowing screen 24/7. In the 1960's every teen of the times was tripping on acid and running off to find themselves in communes and love buses. It was a fad, there was no excuse for it and it passed, just like I think that this generation's "cell phones are necessary for socialization" fad will eventually pass. What will it bring afterwards? I don't even want to know, but I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope that it isn't anything else digital."

"I never said I was sad, I'm just pessimistic, said Alecto. "Expect the worst, that way you'll never be disappointed, Mandy Valems."

"Alecto, have you noticed how downhill this little island is becoming?" Mandy questioned sadly. "All these organic food stores and yoga studios and cellular phone towers… Cape Breton was one of the only places left where it still had that nostalgic small town atmosphere but now… I've only been away for a year, how could things have changed so quickly? I mean, how can the world accept it?"

"C'est la vie," said Alecto, looking extremely tired as he stared out the window at the late November maple keys fluttering down from vibrantly red trees lining the streets on either side of the windshield.

"You don't have to be invisible to disappear."

"Science is not a democracy. Therefore to try to pass of global warming as real just because "98% of scientists say they agree" makes no sense at all. If 98% of psychiatrists said that all mentally ill people needed lobotomized, does that make it true? If 98% of your friends jumped off a building, would you jump, too?"

"In keeping with your policy of bringing Pollution the latest in death and violence, and in living colour, there's going to be something entirely different, death without remediation."

"How promising today's generation is. They can whip out their cellular phones like sheep, instantly take a million digital photos of their cat and then just delete them. But I'd like to see these kids try to artfully use a traditional film camera or make a super 8 home movie. Traditional film takes integrity, nostalgia, effort, patience and imagination - things that the 21st century has very little of. Everything these days, even a superior medium like film photography with an extensively vivid history and an iconic meaning, is becoming disposable in this age."

"Winters are a desolate time where all senses are wiped away, and here in Canada, this is especially true. All smells are sucked clean from the air, leaving only a harsh, icy crispness. Colours are stripped away, leaving a stark white landscape, a sky which stays black at night and gray in the day, a world of only three shades. Stay outside too long, and your hands will get so cold that they'll go numb and turn red, like the claws of a lobster. During a whiteout, even sight itself is reduced to nothingness."

"I've got money! Eve exclaimed in a frantic frenzy of hope, her eyes dancing wildly with the notion that there was some way out of this. "I mean, I don't know what use money is to the Grim Reaper, but I've got a ton of cash! It's in a hat box under my bed! I've got a bright red Lexus in the garage, I've got my engagement ring upstairs, it's real gold, there must be something we can trade off with. "You can't bribe me away, I'm afraid, said Mr. Azrael. "Money means nothing where I come from."

"Try as you might, you'll never be able to please an environmentalist. You can stop using coal to heat your house, you can stop throwing out bottles and cans, you can have every factory in Canada shut down and you can buy only organic gluten-free non-GMO food, you can give up your favorite station wagon for a weird electric hybrid, you can stop developing film and buy a never-ending cycle of digital cameras, you can give up your job at a refinery or mill, and they'll still get after you for not enjoying yourself while doing so."

"It's going to happen soon, a nuclear war. Someday, somewhere, some jackass politician will get in over his head and push the button, and us? Society? We haven't really grasped the full reality of the situation. If a nuclear bomb were detonated, we'd all just be collateral damage. That's why it has to be prevented, because trust me when I say that nobody will be standing up for our rights or life when there's no one left to do so."

"Well, you're not exactly social, are you, Mandy Valems?"Oh yeah, sure, because I'm just surrounded by genius to be social with in this day and age, Mandy replied with razor-sharp sarcasm. "Hey, I don't need anyone else! I've got you, you're my friend, and you'll be with me forever!" 'You won't be with me forever, though' said Alecto cynically. "I'm like a spider's web; anyone who is friends with me gets dragged into my troubles and eventually dies."Poetic, dear friend, Mandy sighed, shaking her head. "Morbid, but poetic."

"Mandy loved the smell of a sunny day after a night of rain. The sun hit the orange puddles, the overgrown, soft, green grass on her lawn, and it beamed down through the orange steel mill smog, sending otherworldly, bizarre shadows across the concrete sidewalk."

"I used to think to myself that I was the last kind of person who should have a guardian angel, but then I realized that maybe my type of person is the kind who angels come to first."

"Her laughter sounded like April showers, like whispered secrets, like glass wind-chimes."

"I might be the hazardous waste site that polluted it, but Cape Breton Island is still my home."

"The worst feeling in the world is not losing your friend forever, but rather having patronizing people tell you that the love you have for your friend and the connection and emotion you have towards them is an illness to be cured, a problem to be covered up and hidden away by the power of mood-altering drugs. I used to trust doctors when I was younger... now I've lost my trust in all mental health professionals forever."

"When did the very first case of racism even occur? When did such blind hatred devour the souls of men and make them turn on their own brothers and sisters? What ever taught them that it was normal to be such monsters?"

"The hardest part of being a Canadian kid is having to color in Nunavut with a crayon in school, hell on earth."

"I don't want any other friends! They'd never be as good a friend as you are."

"We're losing society to apathy, to digital technology, the people who care about nobody else but themselves. They share every little detail of their stupid lives online as if the world even gives a damn— digital technology is getting smarter and society is getting dumber," Mandy whispered in a voice filled with disbelief. "Society is— it's slipping away."

"Why is it these days that so many people hate reading? Some people won't even touch a newspaper or magazine. It isn't television that kills reading, or cinema or radio, or even those accursed little things known as video games. People used to read all the time, but when the century shifted subtly, somewhere along the way, people forgot how to imagine. When did it happen? At what point? Who or what is to blame? Maybe it's just because the world has become so cold and scientific and shallow in recent years."

"Grief is NOT a mental illness or an emotional disorder. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never experienced it for themselves."

"He's completely blown through his younger years like his childhood was one big cigarette to smoke carelessly."

"So many people spend years (and money) studying to be doctors, lawyers, actors, dancers, business executives and scientists - when you're an author, you can be any of these things, and you don't need a degree or certificate; all you need is an imagination, a dream and an open mind."

"I've seen a lot of stuff, maybe I've seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I've seen what they can do, how evil they can be, I've seen the Holocaust and I've seen Jonestown, I've seen the Vietnam War and I've seen Hiroshima, I've seen the Chernobyl disaster, I've seen the World Trade Center attack, I've been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive, Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding."

“Mearth appeared angry and disappointed briefly, but then she just gazed at the ground.
‘It must be horrible, feeling all alone, is it?’ she asked.
‘Oh, not really,’ said Alecto, his eyes lifeless, his voice listless. ‘I’m going to be forgotten by someone who I can’t forget, though. That will be terrible—but maybe it’s better if she does forget me altogether.’”

"Netflix is SO overrated."

"Have you ever noticed how as an adult, all the bright colors go out of your life? Now that I'm not a kid anymore, things always look gray, like a clothesline draped with laundry that's been washed too many times and left to stand in the wind. I guess that's what growing up is, it's a fading photograph."