The Toll (Arc of a Scythe, #3)

by Neal Shusterman

Some things simply made a person feel feminine; other things made a person feel masculine. Wasn’t that true of everyone regardless of gender? Or did binaries deny themselves the things that didn’t fit the mold?

“I have found that building a sandbox around a domineering child, then allowing that child to preside over it, frees the adults to do the real work.”

“No one’s memories are ‘true,’ ” he’d pointed out. “Ten people remember the same thing in ten completely different ways.

“A successful lie is not fueled by the liar; it is fueled by the willingness of the listener to believe. You can’t expose a lie without first shattering the will to believe it. That is why leading people to truth is so much more effective than merely telling them.”

“People are vessels,” Jeri had said to her. “They hold whatever’s poured into them.”

“What’s life if you can’t mess with the future?” he said.

“I will never understand how you binaries are so attached to your birth plumbing. Why should it matter whether a person has ovaries, or testicles, or both?”

There was a total of eleven scythes that morning—a number deeply unpleasant to Tonists, for it was one short of a twelve-note chromatic scale.

so even the wisest person Rowan knew was steeped in ambivalence.