“What are you thinking?She smiled.I think you can figure it out. You can read the writing on the wall.And as she said it, there was writing on the wall. It appeared slowly, one word at a time.You'renottheonlyonefalling.It wrote itself out, in the same curling black script as the rest of the room. Lena's cheeks flushed a little, and she covered her face with her hands. "It's going to be really embarrassing if everything I think starts showing up on the walls.""You didn't mean to do that?""No."You don't need to be embarrassed, L.I pulled her hands away.Because I feel the same way about you.”

“A random crack in the old plaster in the corner behind her seemed to grow, until it curled its way across the ceiling, circled the frosted chandelier, and swirled its way back down. It looked like a heart. A giant, looping, girly heart had just appeared in the cracking plaster of her bedroom ceiling."Lena.""Yeah?""Is your ceiling about to fall in on our heads?"She turned and looked at the crack. When she saw it, she bit her lip, and her cheeks turned pink. "I don't think so. It's just a crack in the plaster.""Were you trying to do that?""No." A creeping pink spread across her nose and cheeks. She looked away.”

“Ethan: I love you, I whispered in her ear.She held my face in her hands and leaned back so she could look at me.Lena: I don't think I could ever love anything the way I love you.”

“She's not my girlfriend. We're just friends," I said automatically. "Shut up. You're so whipped I should buy you a saddle." Which he would've said about any girl I talked to, talked about, or even looked at in the hall. "She's not. Nothing's happened. We just hang out." "You're so full of crap, you could pass for a toilet. You like her, Wate. Admit it." Link wasn't big on subtleties, and I don't think he could imagine hanging out with a girl for any reason other than maybe she played lead guitar, except for the obvious ones.”

“I said it, just like that. No stupid jokes, no changing the subject. For once, I wasn't embarrassed, because it was the truth. I had fallen. I think I had always been falling. And she might as well know, if she didn't already, because there was no going back now. Not for me.”

“I guess that’s the thing about a hero’s journey. You might not start out a hero, and you might not even come back that way. But you change, which is the same as everything changing. The journey changes you, whether or not you know it, and whether or not you want it to.”

“There was no one color that could paint Lena Duchannes. She was a red sweater and a blue sky, a gray wind and a silver sparrow, a black curl escaping from behind her ear.”