“Guilt and rage, hatred and fear were pathways to weakness and clumsy choices.”

“Nix still held Benny's hand, and her grip tightened to an almost crushing force, grinding his hand bones together. It hurt, but Benny would rather have cut that hand off than take it back at that m...”

“I've managed to stay alive out here in the Ruin because I'm a realist. I allow the truth to be the truth, no matter how much I might want it to be something else.”

“So is that it? Will I have to live the rest of my life like this? Not doing the right thing? Not saying the right words?""That's your choice. You can't change the past. Ah, but the future. . .you o...”

“Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.”

“Laurence felt a weird combination of shame and rage, as though he'd grown another new body part just in time to get punched in it.”

“The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear.”

“[She] had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the originalone emotion that time could never fade, and t...”

“In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.'What is it then?'It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, bu...”

“I know how soon youth would fade and bloom perish, if, in the cup of bliss offered, but one dreg of shame, or one flavour of remorse were detected; and I do not want sacrifice, sorrow, dissolution ...”