“You make us look bad', complained Toad.'You looked bad before I ever met you', Jon told him.”

“You look like you belong in a bad comic book,” I told him cheerfully.----------------------“What did the Drakes do that’s got you all pissy?”“Pissy? Did you just call me pissy?”

“Kill me if I ever look that Bad" . . . "Dude, what are you saying? . . . On the TV? That is you, dude. From like five years ago.”

“The way the animals live, everybody envies them, because look, a cat, when it walks--did you ever see a cat making an aesthetic mistake. Did you ever see a badly formed cloud? Were the stars ever misarranged? When you watch the foam breaking on the seashore, did it ever make a bad pattern? Never. And yet we think in what we do, we make mistakes.”

“When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.”

“He said they would be mad at me. He said they would hate me.’Tina saw her hand on the poker again. Some killing was good.‘Lockie, look at me.’He turned away from the yellow fields and his eyes met hers.‘I’ve told you before and you have to believe me: everything the uniform said was a lie. Everything. He lied about taking you to your parents and he lied about them not looking for you and he lied about them being angry with you. Whatever he did or you did he made you do it. He made you do it and he was bad and a liar and you are a good kid.’‘He said they wouldn’t love me ever again.’Tina looked out of the window. The thing about being a kid was that you had to hear the good stuff a lot before you believed it. You only had to hear the bad shit once before it began to eat away at you.”