“Love's not the point. We just do what we always do, and we get by.”

“It's not enough, is it? Just to follow; just to have faith in someone bigger and smarter and better informed. That's how we're built, that's how every Partial is wired - to follow orders and trust in our leaders - but it's not enough. It never has been. We've followed our leaders, and sometimes they win and sometimes they lose; we do what they say and we play our part. But this is our decision. Our mission. And when we're done, it will be our victory, or our defeat. I don't want to fail, but if I do, I want to be able to look back and say, 'I did that. I failed. That was all me.”

“None of this is by accident, and we have to figure out what it all means. She paused. We have to. It's the same old argument I used to have with Mkele: the present or the future. Sometimes you have to put the present through hell to get the future you want.”

“Fear is about things that you can't control. The future or the dark, or someone trying to kill you. You don't get scared of yourself because you always know what you're going to do.”

“In my biology class, we'd talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow. Dogs do, rocks don't, trees do, plastic doesn't. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It eats everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon. Fire grows, and as it spreads, it creates new fires that spread out and make new fires of their own. Fire drinks gasoline and excretes cinders, it fights for territory, it loves and hates. Sometimes when I watch people trudging through their daily routines, I think that fire is more alive than we are–brighter, hotter, more sure of itself and where it wants to go. Fire doesn't settle; fire doesn't tolerate; fire doesn't 'get by.'Fire does.Fire is.”

“[...] Mom’s not keeping me out because it’s a dead friend, she’s keeping me out because it’s a dead sixteen-year-old girl with no clothes on’‘And that’s officially the creepiest thing you’ve ever said,’ said Lauren. She stopped typing, and then grimaced and shivered, like she’d just eaten something disgusting. ‘Seriously – yuck.’I smiled. ‘I’ve got a live girlfriend – what do I need a dead one for?’[…]Lauren folded her arms. ‘How do I know you’re not just trying to get her out of the house for your own nefarious purposes?’I smiled. ‘What kind of trouble am I going to get into? The dead girl doesn’t get here until tomorrow.”

“Life is too short. It's too precious. We have to live in this world, but we don't have to wallow in it. We don't have to fill our lives with all of this darkness.”