“Before we had left for Charleston, I had been shoved—hard—by and unseen spirit wreaking havoc in our house. I had been hurt, but it wasn’t nearly as serious as what had happened in Ohio.I tried to smile. “I guess I’m just a paranormal punching-bag.”

“I was a relationship retard. I kicked, shoved, and punched people out of my life, so they never had a chance to hurt me.”

“I had been born shoved to the margins of the world, sure, but I had volunteered for the pits.”

“What's been tried once had been tried once before... and before... and before...”

“I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.”

“Mia and I had been together for more than two years, and yes, it was a high school romance, but it was still the kind of romance where I thought we were trying to find a way to make it forever, the kind that, had we met five years later and had she not been some cello prodigy and had I not been in a band on the rise - or had our lives not been ripped apart by all this -I was pretty sure it would've been.”