“She's got the kind of ethereal, unselfconscious beauty some young girls possess that breaks your heart. Or theirs.”

“As the dog sprinted back, Jack said to the girl, "Sweetheart,honey, why do you have to be so hateful?""Why not?" Ellie said. "It's not like being good ever got me anywhere.”

“Follow your heart. Just don't get lost.”

“Why can't you like me?" he said, his voice breaking. His scent steamed then, hot and heady with a welter of contradictions: apples and fire and electric roil of those cold, black shadows. "Why can't you like me just a little?"She would never know how she might have answered, because he never gave her the chance.Instead, he kissed her.”

“Run, she told herself. Run, you idiot, run.But she didn't. She couldn't. She just... couldn't.”

“It was that stages-of-anger thing. I was shocked and then I got pissed and then I fought like hell … and then I went numb. They called it acceptance, but it wasn’t. It’s what happens when you have only two choices: live with the monster, or kill yourself.”

“With no sense of smell, your memories dropped like pennies out of a ripped pocket, until the past was ashes and your parents were blanks: nothing more than the holes in Swiss cheese.”