“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“These weird thoughts come into my head, and I don't even really want to think about it, but I can't let go of it until I take it as far as I can, until I reach some kind of ending, and then I can move on. That's what writing is like for me.”

“I don't know what I'm saying, really, but I guess it's like having a kid, though I don't have any kids. It's yours, you made it, and no matter what happens, you have that pride of ownership. You love it, even it it didn't amount to much.”

“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.”