“I screamed until my voice dried up in my throat. We all did. All of us in Ward Six, all of us forgotten, left to rot.”

“I hate both of my parents right now: for sitting quietly in our house, while out in the darkness my heart was beating away all of the seconds of my life, ticking them off one by one until my time was up; for letting the thread between us stretch so far and so thin that the moment it was severed for good they didn't even feel it.”

“We all need mantras, I guess - stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.”

“Segregation has it all wrong. We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us.”

“ "You're my hero," we both say at the same time. I don't hear Kent move, but all of a sudden his voice is closer, and he's found my hands in the dark, and he's cupping them in his.”

“Droplets, droplets: We are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path....He has tipped us over, all of us in our teetering expectancy, and now we are pouring toward him, coursing on a wave of sound, of roaring shouts and applause....They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.”

“We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us.”