“Let me tell you something straight off. This is a love story, but not like any you've ever heard. The boy and the girl are far from innocent. Dear lives are lost. And good doesn't win.”

“I'm not a stranger to your love of lost causes, dear one. But you have to be careful who you meet," he said, stoking a pipe thoughtfully. "You can't unmeet them.”

“You love me," she said. "That's enough. We love each other.""Yes. Yes, that's true." He smiled. "We are a love story.”

“I think we could be friends," he said, falling into step with her. "It's perfect because I wouldn't fall in love with you, like I do with the mermaids. Girls always seem so exotic. But it would be okay with you, because you're more like...you know. Not like a girl." He shrugged.”

“Did you know I always thought you were braver than me? Did you ever guess that that was why I was so afraid? It wasn’t that I only loved some of you. But I wondered if you could ever love more than some of me. I knew I’d miss you. But the surprising thing is, you never leave me. I never forget a thing. Every kind of love, it seems, is the only one. It doesn’t happen twice. And I never expected that you could have a broken heart and love with it too, so much that it doesn’t seem broken at all.”

“People say I'm not much of a girl either," Tiger Lily said.She thought of Tik Tok, who was fond of saying that people were all bits of each thing, boy and girl.”

“As you may have guessed already, Peter had a soul that was always telling itself lies. When he was frightened, his soul told itself, "I'm not frightened." And when something mattered that he couldn't control, Peter's soul told itself, "it doesn't matter." So while I trained my ears and tired to listen hard to him, I couldn't always make out where he was, or what he felt. And so each time he let Wendy come a little closer, I didn't see what it meant, or how it would end.”