Robin Wasserman

“Things fall apart. But things don't just fall apart. People break them.”

“Eli shouted my name, and then his arounds were around me, and I reached for Adriane who held fast to a blistering, burning creature that once had been Max and somehow still breathed and stood and howled. Though he was now nothing but flame, a golem of fire, that lived only because he'd forgotten how to die.”

“You don't even realize you're living in a before until you wake up one day and find yourself in an after.”

“They ask how the universe is arranged, philosophers, mathematicians, and they draw pretty pictures, impossibilities on the page. They save phenomena by telling one ugly lie after another, epicycles upon epicycles, and the fools care not. It is not enough, I tell you, to ask how the cosmos is designed. We must ask why.”

“I envied Elizabeth- but I admired Groot. Because if you truly believed in the lightning bolts, why not do everything in your power to take them for yourself.”

“But things don't just fall apart. People break them.”

“I longed to return to that bloody riverbank, to throw myself in the path of the final arrow, to die ignorant, and so, in love. Better to be killed by an arrow than by the words of the one I most trusted.”

“If you can't remember something, did it really happen?”

“I believed in happily ever after as much as anyone, because Jane Austen, Prince Charming, and Hugh Grant promised me it could happen. But maybe that particular delusion was universal.”

“In dreams you can become everything you're not. You can reverse the most fundamental truths of your life. You can taste death, the ultimate opposite.”

“I told myself I deserved some good luck, overlooking the fact that it would call for substantially more than luck to thrust me into one of those narratives where plain-Jane new girl catches the eye of inexplicably single Prince Charming, because somehow the new school has revealed her wild, irresistible beauty, of which she was never before aware.”

“Sort of pregnant. Sort of dead. Sort of Jewish. These are impossibles.”

“Eli: 'If a machine like that really existed, people would be willing to kill for it. Lots of people.'Nora: 'Yeah, and if hot vampires really existed, suicide would be a viable option for wrinkle prevention. Your point?”

“They were kids. Kids don't care about totalitarianism. For my parents, Prague is picnics on Petrin Hill and homemade knedliky. It's home. They didn't notice the tanks in the backyard, the blood in the streets.”

“Under the best of circumstances, middle school is a sixth-circle-of-hell situation, sandwiched somewhere between flaming tombs and flesh-eating harpies. It's the kind of situation that doesn't need gasoline on the fire, especially when said gasoline comes in the form of your older brother murdering the older sister of the third-most popular girl in school.”

“Life is a physics problem. Bodies in motion.”

“Nobody likes me,” he concluded at the tail end of a ten-minute pity fest.“Can’t imagine why,” Quinn murmured. I turned my snort of laughter into a fake cough,which was an embarrassingly feeble attempt at subterfuge when you consider the fact thatI didn’t have any lungs.”

“And you know what? If there is a God, and it's that same God who's so eager to have temples built in honor of his greatness, and wars fought over him, and people dropping to their knees telling him what a wonderful, magnificent being he is? If this all-powerful, all-knowing creature for some reason just can't get by without my worship? Then let him give me some proof. Or at least get over himself if I decide to go out and get some.”

“I should probably start with the blood.”

“A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe," Max said. "And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else.”

“Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn't exist, all at the same time.”

“They would fade away-and I would be left alone to face the people at school,and the reporters,and Adriane,and all the places where Max had taken my hand or breathed in my ear or told me he loved me,and the emptiness that used to be Chris.”

“Not that my arms are getting tired or anything, but... how much longer is the hugging phase going to last?”

“Chris loved you," I said, and the truth of it was almost a physical pain. She wouldn't look at me. "No he didn't. And he would have figured it out eventually. So would you? Then where would I have been?""Not here.”

“There are some moments you'd rather sleep through, pass from point A to point B without awareness of the time passing or the events that carry you from present to future. And it's mostly those moments in which it's smarter-safer- to stay awake.”

“Rudeness was a sign of weakness. Grace stemmed from power, the power to accept anything and move on.”

“Nor did I need anyone's pity, but I would accept it with grace, because I have been well trained. Rudeness was a sign of weakness. Grace stemmed from power, the powere to accept anything and move on.”

“Stevens, who knew that mouth could do more thana rgue? You're a true blue friend, a red-hot lady and all that other good yearbook shit. You've got a big heart and I've got an even bigger...you know. So we're both winners. KG”

“Full Disclosure: I hate David with the passion of a thousand fiery suns all going to supernova at the same time”

“They had battled and bloodied one another, they had kept secrets, broken hearts, lied, betrayed, exiled, they had walked away, said goodbye and sworn it was forever, and somehow, every time, they had mended, they had forgiven, they had survived. Some mistakes could never be fixed - some, but not all. Some people can't be driven away, no matter how hard you try. Some friendships won't break.”

“I spent most of my teen years trying to figure out the rules of life, theories for why things happened, why people behaved as they did, and mostly I came to the conclusion that either there were no rules, or the rules sucked. Reading science fiction wasn't about imagining myself into some more exciting life filled with adventure, it was about finding a world where things worked the way I wanted them to.”

“I guess that's the secret. It would never have occurred to Lia to want to escape -- but then she gets kicked out. Best thing that ever happened to her? I'm not sure she would say yes, because obliviousness tends to be rather pleasant, but once you realized you've been bolivious, there's no turning back. You can't un-know what you know.You know?”