Amy Kathleen Ryan

“You’re so naïve.” Felicity laughed scornfully. “Don’t you see what people are? They’re animals. Every one of them.”“Felicity.” Waverly grabbed hold of the girl’s hand and squeezed hard enough to hurt, until Felicity lifted her eyes to Waverly’s. “We’re animals, too. We can fight back.”Felicity yanked her hand away. “You idiot. It doesn’t matter how hard you fight.”“It matters to me,” Waverly said quietly.“So fight, then,” Felicity spat over her shoulder.Waverly stood up, fists clenched. “I will.”

“There is a design working behind the curtain of the stars, and we are fulfilling it, drawn toward the future on the tide of time, toward our destiny as the first settlers of a new world."The room was still. He has them, she thought.”

“We do matter. To believe that our lives are meaningful is the essence of faith. We are not as large, or as bright, or as eternal as the stars, but we carry humankind's message of love across the galaxy. We are the first. We are the world makers. Our nourishment is hope. Like the tender reed shaking in the wind, we will reach up to a new sun.”

“It's time to grow uo. You might want some showdown like in the storybooks, but this is not a storybook. This is war. And I can tell you, as someone who watched our families blown out an air lock with my own eyes, war doesn't have a happy ending. Not for anyone.”

“Everything about everything is obvious to everyone.”

“Trust isn't a black and white thing... Everyone has the capacity to let you down at one time or another... [but] if you can't trust, you can't love (pg. 215).”

“Smiles that are meant to hide something never last very long, especially when the smile is hiding guilt (pg. 183).”

“It's not fair that the gorgeous get more gorgeous when they're pissed, while the ugly only get more hideous. ”

“Alarm clocks were invented by fork-tongued devils disguised as gremlins wearing snake masks.”

“[There's] one... thing I can tell you about human nature: beautiful people are the last ones you want to befriend. Beautiful people float through life thinking that it's perfectly normal for others to gaze at them adoringly, and open doors for them, and defer to their opinion... Doesn't anyone understand that beautiful people are stupid? That's why nature made them beautiful, so they'd have a chance at surviving in the wild. And how do they survive? They use people and then they drop people, and they float away on the currents of their own gorgeousness to the next poor girl who thinks that being friends with a beutiful person will somehow make her beautiful, too. I've got news for you: Hanging around beautiful people just makes you uglier by comparison.”