“It's one thing to know a truth in your head but another to understand it in your heart.”

“You know how you can think you know someone or think you know them but maybe you only know them one way?" He sneaks a glance at me and I notice that his cheeks are red in the moonlight. "Maybe you know someone as your little sister's friend," he says. "And then maybe something shifts. Maybe one day you hear them say something unexpected. Or hear the way they laugh and then suddenly you see them all over again. Like this time it's different. This time maybe you see them as ..." He pauses. "Beautiful," he finishes. Catcher leans in closer. "Wonderful and funny.”

“Life is never that simple. And the fact that it's not that simple to you means only one thing: You're still alive.”

“I don't understand how I can know so little about love and how it works. How I can be so bad at it when it's all I've ever wanted.All I've ever known is about leaving or being left.”

“It's not about surviving. It should be about love. When you know love...that's what makes this life worth it. When you live with it everyday. Wake up with it, hold on to it during the thunder and after a nightmare. When love is your refuge from the death that surrounds us all and when it fills you so tight that you can't express it.”

“Do you ever think it's the dead that have the happy ending? Just they don't have to worry about surviving.""But they're dead," he says"Yeah. That means they don't have to remember anything."Elias shakes his head. "That means they can't ever love."I snort. "So they don't know loss.”

“It all seems so worthless. Such a waste of lives. We've spent hundreds of years since the Return buffering the Dark City and trying to maintain it - scraping out a life that will soon be wiped out. And what of the rest of the world that's already fallen? Stars blinking away, their light slowly fading? Somewhere out there a star's just dying and we'll never know about it. Somewhere another's being born whose light we'll never see. The Earth will spin, the stars will rearrange themselves around one another and the world will crawl with the dead who one day will drop into nothing ness: no humans left for them to scent, no flesh for them to crave. Everything-all of us-will simply cease to be.”