“Then I asked her if she wanted to to the funeral, and my God, the look on her face. You'd think I'd asked her to drown the neighbor's cat."Admittedly, drowning the neighbor's cat didn't really clue me in as much as I would've liked. "So, she was angry?"He blinked back to me and stared. Like a long time.”

“Why does she want me?" Coraline asked the cat. "Why does she want me to stay here with her?""She wants something to love, I think," said the cat. "Something that isn't her. She might want something to eat as well. It's hard to tell with creatures like that.”

“The Lady Amalthea beckoned, and the cat wriggled all over, like a dog, but he would not come near... She was offering her open palm to the crook-eared cat, but he stayed where he was, shivering with the desire to go to her"...[later, Molly asked the cat] "Why were you afraid to let her touch you? I saw you. You were afraid of her.""If she had touched me," he said very softly, "I would have been hers and not my own, not ever again. I wanted her to touch me but I could not let her. No cat will... The price is more than a cat can pay.”

“She stumbled back a step. “Carlos was the…?”“Panther, aye.”“He’s a cat?” And her boss was a dog. She shook her head. Was her next door neighbor a goldfish?”

“It seared her senses; it made her feel alive, even as it sucked that life away - and she kept coming back to it, again and again. Waves of sensation pulled her under - drowning her. But Blue made drowning feel like the loveliest thing. Like she was losing her breath, but she didn't need it, didn't want it, only wanted him.”

“There are no words for how much I will miss her, but I try to kiss her so that she'll know. I try to kiss her to tell her the whole story of my love, the way I dreamed of her when she was dead, the way that every other girl seemed like a mirror that showed me her face. The way my skin ached for her. The way that kissing her made me feel like I was drowning and like I was being saved all at the same time. I hope she can taste all that, bittersweet, on my tongue.”