“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.”

“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.”

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

“It was, come to think of it, a little like a kinder, gentler Psycho-Dad making one of his command decisions. Exactly the same, only without all the fuss and blood.”

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

“The grief in her green eyes slips then hardens and, for an instant, Pendleton sees the woman she has become and has no right being, not at sixteen.”

“My English teacher said that a writer is the worst judge of his own work.”