“It’s not the wisest thing - love - but when it happens, there’s not a lot you can do to stop it. Sometimes you just have to soldier on through.”

“I just want that, the way I feel when you kiss me. Just having it makes all the bad things better.”

“‎The simple truth is that you can understand a town. You can know and love and hate it. You can blame it, resent it, and nothing changes. In the end, you're just another part of it.”

“The way Lillian says it is hungry, like she’s waiting for something to be revealed, and I wonder if maybe that’s the real difference between us—that when she pulls back the curtain and stares into the blackness behind it, it’s just one more way of testing herself. Like some game you can never win, because even if you face all the shocking realities and the horrors of the world, once you’ve seen that kind of awfulness, you can never un-see it. You have to carry it around with you forever.”

“Love is when you care more about something else than you do about yourself.”

“Don’t you ever just have those days where even if you don’t really like someone, you might as well hang out with them because right then, it’s better than being alone?”

“Sometimes this was just the way the game ended. Sometimes you did your best, and it all went straight to hell anyway.”