“Monster only had the power that you gave them”

“Do I get paid, too?''Yes,' he said without hesitation. This scared me, because Crawley gave money like bulls gave milk: not at all, and you get gored for asking. If he had already decided this was a paying job, it must be horrible beyond words.”

“Look behind you now.Do you feel in your heart a slight hastening of its beat, and a powerful sense that something momentous is about to happen?... Perhaps, then, this is the hour that Mary Hightower takes to the sky with thousands Afterlights heading toward Memphis.... Perhaps this is the moment that Nick, the Chocolate Ogre, arrives in the same city in search for Allie, only to find that he has no idea where to look.... Perhaps this is the very instant that a monster called the McGill arrives there as well, aching to ease his pain by sharing his misery - not only with his new minions, but with anyone he can.... And perhaps you can sense, in some small twisting loop of your gut, the covergence of the wrong, of the right, and the woefully misguided. If you do, then pay sharp attention to the moment you wake, and the moment you fall asleep.... For maybe then you will know, without a shadow of doubt, which is which.”

“Their fate rested entirely on me. I could save them by telling the truth. I could destroy them by lying. No one should have that much power.”

“Allie took Nick and Mikey into the vault, and they sat there, a summit meeting of three questionable superpowers: a skinjacker, an ex-ogre, and a part-time monster.”

“You can't imagine what it's like to be torn between darkness and light- to be a traitor no matter what move you make. If my grandmother and Marissa died tonight, it would be because I had stayed in the darkness too long, flirting with the idea of being Cedric's consigliere. If that happened, I could never live with myself- but if Cedric gave me the bite as he planned, I would be forced to live with it forever. That was the worst hell I could imagine.”

“Picking locks was not a skill he had ever cultivated, but he persisted day after day, turning the tip of his talon into different ways of approaching a keyhole. He never tired, and he ever gave up...because if there was any justice in the universe, he wouldn't be trapped here forever.”