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The most dangerous sicknesses are those that make us believe we are well.
The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.
Hearts are fragile things. That’s why you have to be so careful.
I’m not ugly, but I’m not pretty, either.
Finally someone who gets me
Black is too morbid; red will set them on edge; pink is too juvenile; orange is freakish.
RUDE.
“You can’t be really happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes.
Sacrifice.
It’s so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it’s taking forever to come. Then it happens and it’s over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.
He does remember. He was there.
Mama, Mama, help me get home I’m out in the woods, I am out on my own. I found me a werewolf, a nasty old mutt It showed me its teeth and went straight for my gut. Mama, Mama, help me get home I’m out in the woods, I am out on my own. I was stopped by a vampire, a rotting old wreck It showed me its teeth, and went straight for my neck. Mama, Mama, put me to bed I won’t make it home, I’m already half-dead. I met an Invalid, and fell for his art He showed me his smile, and went straight for my heart.
No foster parent will adopt a child whose past has been tainted by the disease.
It’s strange how being around the regulators will do that to you. Even when they’re being relatively nice, you can’t help but think of all the bad stories you’ve heard—the raids and the beatings and the ambushes.
Poe must have snuck out a lot when he was young.
I’m just a girl
Out of control—that’s what it was, that’s what I hated.
A world without fear. Impossible.
Maybe this is the secret to talking to boys—maybe you just have to be angry all the time.
“You were pretty hard to miss. You used to run around the statue and do this jumping, whooping thing.”
Is it possible to flirt without knowing you’re flirting? Is he flirting?
Most things, even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings in something small.
The question was: Will you meet me tomorrow? And the word was: Yes.
I’d never understood how Hana could lie so often and so easily. But just like anything else, lying becomes easier the more you do it.
Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you—sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.
No way to avoid evaluations unless you lie. No way to avoid procedure unless you lie. You must lie.
Vampires and werewolves and Invalids: things that will rip into you, tear you to shreds. Deadly things.
I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It’s hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.
That evening we read that the Time and Temperature Building registered 102 degrees: the hottest day on record for the summer so far.
This summer the hottest it has been so far was 108 degrees
I don’t feel anything.
without really thinking about what I was doing, I scooped up a rock from the ground and turned around and hurled it in his direction.
Good for you
And there it is: Even though we’re standing in the same patch of sun-drenched pavement, we might as well be a hundred thousand miles apart.
Best friends for more than ten years and in the end it all comes down to the edge of a scalpel, to the motion of a laser beam through the brain and a flashing surgical knife.
It’s amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me—such bullshit.
That’s the whole point, after all: There’s no going back.
“Even when you haven’t done anything wrong, it still makes you jumpy.”
I would never do that. Never ever ever. Not even if I had a million procedures. He was alive. He had a heartbeat and blood and breath, and they left him there like trash.
It strikes me how small everything is, our whole world, everything with meaning—our stores and our raids and our jobs and our lives, even.
“I just want to be normal, like everybody else.” “Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?”
As I lie there with the hurt driving through my chest and the sick, anxious feeling churning through me and the desire for Alex so strong inside of me it’s like a razor blade edging its way through my organs, shredding me, all I can think is: It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don’t care.
I have this terrible fear that time will stop completely, while this woman has her pinkie finger buried up her right nostril, right in front of the tray of wilted lettuce.
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that I can still taste Alex’s lips against mine, can still feel his hand sliding over my shoulders.
I want to grab him, pull him toward me, kiss him right there.
This is one symptom of the deliria no one ever tells you about: Apparently the disease turns you into a world-class liar.
Words that mean nothing, really, just sounds intoned into vastness and darkness, little scrabbling attempts to latch on to something when we’re falling.
“That’s when you really lose people, you know. When the pain passes.”
Everything I see and touch reminds me of him, and so everything I see and touch is perfect.
It’s an incredible thing, how you can feel so taken care of by someone and yet feel, also, like you would die or do anything just for the chance to protect him back.
I guess the whole punishable-by-death thing isn’t really a big attraction.
“The no-plumbing thing is kind of a bummer,” he says. “But you have to admit the view is killer.”
One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world—your little carved-out sphere—is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart.
An endless blur of normal people doing normal things, eyes straight ahead of them, paying no attention to the short, nondescript girl with a lumpy backpack pushing past them. The short, nondescript girl with a secret burning inside of her like a fire.
