Ilsa J. Bick

“What about study hall? Shouldn't I go to the library? "What for, Ms. Lord?" Mr. anderson said. "You're with me”

“Obeying orders just to obey is the mark of a person who has ceased to think. Remember, it is better to suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong.”

“But sticking to rules just because they're there does not make them right. You need to learn when the rules should be broken.”

“Sometimes you don't know what you need until it's gone”

“As the dog sprinted back, Jack said to the girl, "Sweetheart,honey, why do you have to be so hateful?""Why not?" Ellie said. "It's not like being good ever got me anywhere.”

“There are those individuals who die for a cause, and we say they have made the ultimate sacrifice. We call them martyrs, and we never doubt their sincerity.Yet many others search their entire lives for something—or someone—worth dying for and this is very different. These are the lonely and the desperate, fearful that their lives have no meaning. They yearn for the bullet, if only someone else will pull the trigger.”

“The familiar was usually invisible; how many people really noticed everything they saw?”

“They call it the drowning instinct. It's when drowning doesn't look like drowning.”

“With no sense of smell, your memories dropped like pennies out of a ripped pocket, until the past was ashes and your parents were blanks: nothing more than the holes in Swiss cheese.”

“My English teacher said that a writer is the worst judge of his own work.”

“I didn't throw the paper away.Maybe I should have.Oh, the things you know in retrospect.”

“...She'd drawn the moment of her death.No. NO. She'd DRAWN herself to death.”

“This Army of Light was mine. I had summoned it. I had DRAWN it.Could I have stopped it? I don't know.The truth is, I didn't want to.”

“I don't know what I expected.No, I'm lying. I know what I wanted.”

“I doubted I would need my eyes. I drew in the dark, after all.”

“The things you think about when you're a hair's breath away from getting yourself killed.”

“It was that stages-of-anger thing. I was shocked and then I got pissed and then I fought like hell … and then I went numb. They called it acceptance, but it wasn’t. It’s what happens when you have only two choices: live with the monster, or kill yourself.”

“This is a fairy tale with teeth and claws.”

“So I need the story, Jenna. I need the truth.Right, like the two are the same thing.”

“The grief in her green eyes slips then hardens and, for an instant, Pendleton sees the woman she has become and has no right being, not at sixteen.”

“She's got the kind of ethereal, unselfconscious beauty some young girls possess that breaks your heart. Or theirs.”

“It was, come to think of it, a little like a kinder, gentler Psycho-Dad making one of his command decisions. Exactly the same, only without all the fuss and blood.”

“Run, she told herself. Run, you idiot, run.But she didn't. She couldn't. She just... couldn't.”

“Why can't you like me?" he said, his voice breaking. His scent steamed then, hot and heady with a welter of contradictions: apples and fire and electric roil of those cold, black shadows. "Why can't you like me just a little?"She would never know how she might have answered, because he never gave her the chance.Instead, he kissed her.”

“Those brain-zapped kids weren’t the only - or maybe even the worst - enemy.”

“What's the point of not taking chances? I don't know if I could stand living my whole life afraid.”

“I am a ghost in a land of phantoms and forgotten nightmares.”

“Follow your heart. Just don't get lost.”