“Children are not guaranteed the luxuries of family, Ms. Wells," he said. "If people are unable to exist within the parameters that have been created for them, they lose any claim to titles like son and daughter.”

“She is prettier than her picture had prepared me for, blond curls, big blue eyes, like a fake child that someone would make in order to convince people to have children.”

“Even awful people can be polite for a few minutes,” their father told them. “Any longer than that and they revert to the bastards they really are.”

“He tried to think of all the people in his life as chemicals, the uncertainty of mixing them together, the potential for explosions and scarring.”

“I know why you picked that movie,' he told her. Annie smiled and said, 'It fits our life in a few ways, I guess.' Buster pointed at the screen, which was now blank. 'It shows you that you have to stay vigilant to find a missing person, even when people tell you not to, that it's possible to bring them back from the dead.' Annie shook her head. 'I picked it because it shows that after you bring someone back from the dead, you get to kill them yourself.”

“You are very sweet," she told him after a year of dating, as they shared dessert at a restaurant, "but it's like your family trained you to react to the world in a way that was so specific to their art that you don't know how to interact with people in the real world. You act like every conversation is just a buildup to something awful.”

“People would call him Professor Fang, which sounded so much like a super villain that he wasn't sure he could go through with it.”