“And oh, god, how could so much regret and so much sweetness and so much sadness all be present in that single moment. I was already dead and missing my unlived life. I was already dead and Tobias was mourning.I tried to smile. For him.”

“I've always believed that to some extent you get to decide for yourself what your life will be like. You can either look at the world and say "Oh, isn't it all so tragic, so grim, so awful." Or you can look at the world and decide that it's mostly funny.If you step back far enough from the details, everything gets funny. You say war is tragic. I say, isn't it crazy the way people will fight over nothing? People fight wars to control crappy little patches of empty desert, for crying out loud. It's like fighting over an empty soda can. It's not so much tragic as it is ridiculous. Asinine! Stupid!You say, isn't it terrible about global warming? And I say, no, it's funny. We're going to bring on global warming because we ran too many leaky air conditioners? We used too much spray deodorant, so now we'll be doomed to sweat forever? That's not sad. That's irony.”

“I felt exalted.It was my moment. This was my place and mytime and my own perfection.I was no longer afraid. Weird. If I'd had amouth I'd have smiled. I said.No one moved. I asked.No answer. I said, almost laughing.”

“Jalil has this habit of not turning his head much, just moving his eyes, skeptical, appraising, not impressed by much. It takes him a while to talk and you might think he's slow. But when you get to know him, you realize he's slow to talk because his brain has already jumped ahead three spaces and he has to back up to deal with you.”

“Oh, I'm sure we could talk them into letting us in for nothing," Marco said. "Just tell themwe're Animorphs.""Tell them we're what?" Rachel asked."Idiot teenagers with a death wish," Marco said."Animorphs." I tried the word out. It sounded okay.”

“I was Jake's insurance policy. He thought maybe he wouldn't have to use me. He hoped, anyway. But down deep he knew, and I knew, and we both hid the truth from the others because Cassie couldn't let Jake make that decision, and Tobias couldn't let me, and those two, by loving us, would have screwed everything up. It was a war, after all. A war we had to win.”

“ Tobias asked."Weird? Weird?" Marco crowed. "The talking bird wants to know if getting information onthe location of an alien from a whale, that you've just saved from sharks, by turning intodolphins . . . You're suggesting that's weird?”