“When I was younger, I'd wanted someone to promise me that things would work out and nothing bad would ever happen again. But I understood now that that was a child's wish. No one could promise that. No one. The grown-ups could try, but they couldn't promise, not and mean it.”

“Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.”

“...But the one thing that I would never, ever recover from would be losing you. You made me promise before to go on if that happened, but Bones, I wouldn't want to. - Cat from This Side of the Grave”

“When I was growing up, no one could get away with telling me I couldn't do something "because you're a girl." In fact, if someone wanted me not to do something, that was the worst thing they could say: It practically guaranteed I'd run out and try to do it.”

“I would not be a Moses to lead you into the Promised Land, because if I could lead you into it, someone else could lead you out of it.”

“Nobody can know ... just how heavy a burden trying to protect another human being can be. I was still a child. I couldn't have understood the real meaning of my promise.”