“No one in history had ever done less and yet been so wrong.”

“The truth was that she had managed to betray everyone by doing nothing. No one in history had ever done less and yet been so wrong. Not cheating on a non-boyfriend with the non-boyfriend of a friend. The pressure of thinking that one through made her swollen body ache.”

“After that, I felt like I had two lives. There was the me I had been before the attack, the one people knew and wanted to relate to. The one people wanted to comfort and fix. And there was another me, a hidden me that no one ever saw. There was a me who had tasted death. That me knew things others people didn't know.”

“It was a bit on the frantic side, maybe because neither one of us had done the metal preparation, so we were both thinking, Oh, right! Kissing! Quickly! Quickly! More movement! Deploy tongue!”

“The cast of Hamlet had not moved much. They had that haunted yet hopeful look in their eyes, like the ones you see in photographs of people crammed into steerage compartments, traveling to some new, unknown land.”

“It was okay to give up. I'd been brave. Everyone would say so. And yet...even as I opened a dresser drawer and figured out which things I would take with me in this hypothetical scenario, I remembered the problem. There would still be ghosts. I would still have a future.”

“I had one class in the morning, the mysteriously named "Further Maths". It was two hours long and so deeply frightening that I think I went into a trance.”