“I'd be your sky.”

“Oh, Atticus,” it says soft, and the softness is scarier than the rest in its sorrow. “I’d have done anything you asked. I’d have been your sea and sky.”

“What's the moral of the story?People Above will hurt you. People Above will break you, and devour your heart raw.”

“Because even if we're strange and Cursed and Beasts, the people Above are monsters.”

“Healing's not always natural, she says. Healing's not always the way a body wants to go. Sometimes the body wants to run. Sometimes it can't think of anything but what might stop the pain. And though stopping the pain's important if you want a body healing, it isn't the whole. Sometimes that just keeps you broke.”

“He yells, straightens up with a swear that tells me he is the one, he's the one that broke my Ariel, broke her down made her Freak made her scared of sweet words or touching so I had to walk slow and careful, talk soft and always be patient and never just kiss her like I wanted to. Took away her want to be kissed.”

“The thing is, you make choices. You do some things and you don't do others and in the end there's not much point in asking what different choices might have gained you, and lost you, unless you have a time machine. You become those choices, you embody them...I'd known I couldn't stay, just as I'd known years before I couldn't be with him, even as I'd gone on pretending I had a choice. I was who I was, and I wanted what I already had.”