“In spite of my wisecracking, pain-in-the-ass ways, I was the clip that held things together. Unnoticed. Taken for granted. Okay, maybe I'm giving myself too much credit here, but I'd be damned if I was gonna keep on being the family paper clip.”

“Are those paper clips?' I'd seen them in catalogs, but the pictures don't do them justice. They're beautiful, in an industrial sort of way.Eldric poured a clinking waterfall into my palm. 'Aren't they lovely! I can't keep my hands off them. But I give you fair warning: It was a box of paper clips that got me expelled.''Expelled?''A box of thousand paper clips,' he said, his long fingers curling, coiling, twisting. 'And a sack of colored glass.''Expelled!' I might be a wicked girl who'd think nothing of eating a baby for breakfast, but I'd never allow myself to get expelled. It's far too public.”

“Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly.”

“The clipping said forgiveness meant that God is for giving, and that we are here for giving too, and that to withold love or blessings is to be completely delusional.”

“... had ideas, crazy, late-night fantasies strung together like a paper-clip chain.”

“If I was Todd's wife in real life, I'd have to kill myself. Okay, maybe I'm being a bit melodramatic. I wouldn't kill myself. But I'd definitely turn lesbian, at the very least.”