“Carney is like a graveyard where everyone already owns their plots and has built houses on top of them.”

“Cassel, she said, you want to know how to be the most charming guy anyone's ever met? Remind them of their favorite person. Everyone's favorite person is their own damn self.”

“If you keep it," Daneca says, "he'll have his claws in you."Everyone has their claws in me. Everyone.”

“You're like this leopard who's pretending to be a house cat.”

“There is something of yours that i would like to return to you . . . He leaned across the distance between them and caught her mouth with his own.”

“I'd get out of here," he said. "Go someplace where no one knew me. Start over. Go to Paris like you did or go to — I don't know — Prague. Somewhere." He looked toward the window, like he could already see himself gone."Oh," she said, because it hurt that he was thinking about that when she was thinking about him. She narrowed her eyes. "What's stopping you?"The boy looked down at the book of fairy tales. "Nothing," he said.Lila wanted to be the one to stop him.”

“There’s something about her—Cassel, I have met many evil men and women in my life. I have made deals with them, drank with them. I have done things that I myself have difficulty reconciling—terrible things. But I have never known anyone like your mother. She is a person without limits—or if she has any, she hasn’t found them yet. She never needs to reconcile anything.”