“The thing with Rubik's cubes, sometimes you make them worse when you try to fix them. I didn't want to make her worse, and I also didn't know how to make her better.”

“Make them do as you want them to," she said."I can’t," mourned Anne. "Averil is such an unmanageable heroine. She will do and say things I never meant her to. Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over again.”

“Nice people sometimes do terrible things because they don't want to do one small mean thing. It doesn't automatically make them a bad person forever.”

“There was something about clowns that was worse than zombies. (Or maybe something that was the same. When you see a zombie, you want to laugh at first. When you see a clown, most people get a little nervous. There's the pallor and the cakey mortician-style makeup, the shuffling and the untidy hair. But clowns were probably malicious, and they moved fast on those little bicycles and in those little crammed cars. Zombies weren't much of anything. They didn't carry musical instruments and they didn't care whether or not you laughed at them. You always knew what zombies wanted.)”

“Besides, if one little kiss makes her a slut, I'd hate to know what that makes you.”

“I thought you didn't want to let me go.”

“I love who you are. Because you accept me for who I am. You make me laugh, sometimes even at myself. And you make me happy.”