“Let me enlighten you. We are a pack of liars, thieves, and wastrels, the lot ofus...There is not an honestly gained parcel of land in the whole earldom. Every acre, every village was stolen through one reprehensible manner or another. Deceit, blackmail, extortion, all ofit. It’s disgusting.”Alex waited a moment to make sure Whit was quite through before asking, “How long ago?”“Did we steal the land, do you mean?”Alex nodded.“Up until about a hundred years ago, then the wastrels took over.”

“There's a switch inside every one of us that I guess grew there as a necessary part of survival. How can you drag a fish up out of the river for your supper if you feel the yank of the hook in your own cheek? I get that part. We can't feel for everyone and everything all the time. We'd die of fear or sorrow a hundred times a day. The thing is, it's gotten so we flick the switch off like it's nothing. And, more often than not, we forget to turn it back on.”

“He'd become so accustomed to having her there, right there next to him, that he found he could no longer go the day without needing to see her. Even the space of a few hours made him feel restless and dissatisfied.”

“Some flavor of all of this would have remained undiscovered to me. If you try to observe the world for long enough through the perfect lens, then one day it will surely settle permanently into place, and then every object is a still life. You live in the moments between blinks.”

“Howie?” Arthur says. “What?” “Why do you want me to freak out?” He asks it sort of gently, which makes it worse somehow.“Because you make me freak out all the time.” Maybe I’m not so totally chill, but whatever, whatever, I’m sick of it. “Like, honestly, I’m pretty sure I’ve started doing it professionally. Maybe you should start considering paying me extra. ‘Cause seriously, dude, when it comes to freaking out about you, I am the master. I am friggin’ incomparable, I got mad skills all over the place. And I don’t think this is exactly mutual freaking out, like, I don’t get the sense that I make you want to wither and die and explode. And that’s okay. That’s cool. I’m kind of going through a thing here that you probably went through a long time ago, unless you didn’t go through it at all because you’re just all together, like, you popped out of the womb, all, ‘Thanks for squeezing me out, Mom; no more pussy for me.”

“It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.”

“What are you?" I asked."I'm the Ghost of the Night Before Exams.""And how long did it take you to come up with that?" Jazza asked."I'm a busy man," he replied.”