“Temae looked at him with a raised eyebrow and he realized she was taking in his attire. “Are you really going to meet her dressed like that?”“These are the best clothes I’ve got.”“That is what you wear all the time.”“Like I said.”

“Sometimes it’s possible to do everything right and still fail.”

“I don't like anybody or anything," said Lucinda.Yes, you do;--you like horses to ride, and dresses to wear.”

“Do what you must,” Alexa repeated as she glared at them. “You might not want to come too close… though… for your own safety…” She gritted her teeth. “Ask Sorien or your colleagues… Didn’t they tell you? I BITE!”

“On the flight over to Chicago, I thought of a story Mom had once told me from her days as a pediatric nurse. "There was this little boy I was taking care of," she said "and he was terminally ill,and we all knew it,but he kept hanging on and hanging on. He wouldn't die, it was so sad.And his parents were always there with him,giving him so much love and support,but he was in so much pain,and it really was,time for him to go.So finally some of us nurses took his father aside and we told him, 'You have to tell your son it's okay for him to go. You have to give him permission.' And so the father took his son in his arms and he sat with him in a chair and held on to him and told him over and over, that it was okay for him to go,and,well,after a few moments,his son died.”

“Augustus glanced away from the screen ever so briefly. “You look nice,” he said. I was wearing this just-past-the-knees dress I’d had forever. “Girls think they’re only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I’m going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him.”

“It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.”