The Boy on the Bridge (The Girl With All the Gifts, #2)

by M.R. Carey

He had already learned to read, but now he learned the pleasure of stories which is like no other pleasure—the experience of slipping sideways into another world and living there for as long as you want to.

To go mad, to lose your mind, which is the only thing that’s really yours because it’s really you … That would be an inexpressibly terrible thing.

Do we always fret about our partners’ exes? he wonders. And do we extend that to everyone they knew before they met us? Is it their whole past we’re jealous of, as though we want them to be born again when we walk into their lives? It’s a depressing thought. He has believed himself to be bigger than that, and a whole lot more rational.

You have a life and then it ends and you’re dead. Living it is the point, not proving to other people that you were there.

Things don’t end, after all. They only change, and you keep changing with them.