The Darkest Minds (The Darkest Minds, #1)

by Alexandra Bracken

Dreaming led to disappointment, and disappointment to a kind of depressed funk that wasn’t easy to shake. Better to stay in the gray than get eaten by the dark.

It’s the feeling you get when you realize something you once lost is lost forever, and you can never get it back again.” Cate took a deep breath. “I thought of that word often at Thurmond.

That had to have been the fakest attempt at optimism since my fourth grade teacher tried reasoning that we were better off without the dead kids in our class because it’d mean more turns on the playground swings for the rest of us.

Cate had told me that I needed to divide my life into three acts and close the first two behind me—but how did someone do that? How were you just supposed to forget?

That girl was gone forever, and all that was left was a product of the place that had taught her to fear the bright things inside of her heart.

“He’s so busy looking inside people to find the good that he misses the knife they’re holding in their hand.”

“I could kiss you!” Chubs cried. “Please don’t!”

“Ruby,” Chubs said. Then again, louder. “Ruby! Oh, for the love of . . . we were talking about Black Betty, not your Orange ass.”

When a girl cries, few things are more worthless than a boy. Having two of them just meant that they stared at each other helplessly instead of at me. Chubs and Liam stood, up to their ears in awkward, until Chubs finally reached out and patted my head like he would have patted a dog.

Rabbits need dignity and, above all, the will to accept their fate.

“Maybe nothing will ever change for us,” he said. “But don’t you want to be around just in case it does?”

“Try to imagine where we’d be without you, darlin’,” he said, quietly, “and then maybe you’ll see just how lucky we got.”