“Sometimes I think I would rather just remember it in my head, all those streets and the places I loved. The way it smelled of car exhaust and sweet fruit. The thickness of the heat. The sound of do...”

“I wanted her to have the full, long life that every parent promises his or her child by the simple act of bringing that child into the world.”

“English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the s...”

“I took his razor from the shower floor, bits of his black hair still caked between the blades. I took his toothbrush from the sink counter and sucked on the bristles, trying to find the taste of hi...”

“You shouldn't want to be like everyone else. Then you wouldn't be like you.”

“You dont understand, my dad said. They stop you. Who? What are you talking about? my mom asked. Thats why I was being cautious. Who stops you? The police. If youre white, or maybe Oriental, they le...”

“He said that if I ever hurt you, he'd find me and kill me. I told him that if I ever hurt you, I'd want him to." - Aiden MacRae”

“She smirks."Are you attempting to stop me, little one?""Excuse me? Did you just call me 'little one'? What are you? Like, four feet tall?" I ask.”

“The first one is always the hardest.”

“What the world stigmatizes as romantic is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed.”

“Sky, wait. The way his voice wraps around my name makes me wish the only word in his entire vocabulary way Sky.”

“I'm not going to do it again," Lena Marquez whispered to the red purse across the hall from her nestle of blankets. "Never again.”

“Though there had yet to be a victor in this great war that had begun almost three years ago, Maurice had written to her that they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. Freedom to thin...”

“Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.”

“I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there's a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air ...”