“I'll be your family now," he says. "I love you," I say. (....)He stares at me. I wait with my hands clutching his arms for stability as he considers his response. He frowns at me. "Say it again.""T...”

“I regret..." Tobias tilts his head, and sighs. "I regret my choice.""What Choice?", and... I felt like maybe I could make something more of my decision."”

“No matter how long you train someone to be brave, you never know if they are or not until something real happens.”

“Because inside me is a beast that snarls, and growls, and strains toward freedom.. and as hard as I try, I cannot kill it.”

“I could never hurt him enough to make his betrayal stop hurting. And it hurts, in every part of my body.”

“Crying defies scientific explanation. Tears are only meant to lubricate the eyes. There is no real reason for tear glands to overproduce tears at the behest of emotion.”

“I was smiling yesterday,I am smiling today and I will smile tomorrow.Simply because life is too short to cry for anything.”

“You stay safe, You love. You survive. You laugh and cry and struggle and sometimes you fail and sometimes you succeed. You Push.”

“I cut myself because you wouldn't let me cry.I cried because you wouldn't let me speak.I spoke because you wouldn't let me shine.I shone because I thought you loved me...”

“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 ...”