“Vampires are cruel." Steopa said. "we exist to weed out the weak and the unneeded. We feed on humans.”

“What makes this inner void so difficult to deal with is that it's amorphous. We can't fix it because we can't pinpoint its precise cause. And even if we could, we wouldn't be able to banish it. It's the price we pay for being human.”

“What, are you like Buffy or something? A vampire slayer?”I wish. “No, but my sister is. And my boyfriend’s a vampire so I know a lot about their kind.”Jayden shrinks back from me, wide-eyed.“No, no. He’s one of the good ones. Not all vampires are evil,” I assure him.“So…you’re dating…Edward Cullen.”“Sure, if you have to relate it all to a Stephenie Meyer book,” I grudgingly agree. “But don’t say that to Magnus’s face. He’s a card-carrying member of Team Jacob. Even has the T-shirt.”

“The older I get, the more I realize that what other people think about me has little to do with who I am. … We can’t change other people, and we can’t force them to see us the way we would like to be seen.”

“Up here, far away from everybody, the night is peaceful: there's no sound except the hum of the Earth. At school, when I sang the note to Mr Hughes Music he said it was B flat but he laughed when I said it was the note the Earth hummed. He said: You'll be hearing the music of the spheres next, Gwenni. But he doesn't know how the Earth's deep, never-ending note clothes me in rainbow colors, fills my head with all the books ever written, and feeds me with the smell of Mrs. Sergeant Jones's famous vanilla biscuits and the strawberry taste of Instant Whip and the cool slipperiness of glowing red jelly. I could stay up here for ever without the need for anything else in the whole world.”

“Yet if we are to take the Lacanian account of singularity seriously, we must admit that what really counts in life is not our ability to evade chaos, but rather our capacity to meet it in such a manner as to not be irrevocably broken or demolished.”

“And if we know how to light a fire, why do we carry tinder around with us?"Because you're humans," the little one explained serenly. "You're stupid.”