“Maybe one day you’ll understand I don’t want nothing more than to sweetly hold your hand.”

“Echo, I can’t tell you what’s going to happen because I don’t know. I don’t hold hands in the halway or sit at anyone else’s lunch table. But I swear …on my brothers that you’ll never be a joke to me and you’ll be much more than a girl in the backseat of my car.”

“I had learned how it felt to want more than the sweet touch of hand to cheek or lips to palm, more than a kiss, more than an embrace. I was starting to discover that it is not only the mind that understands love, but also the body.”

“I don’t want your lying kindness. Sure, you’ll smile and be so sweet to me that I’ll trust you, but the minute I don’t give you everything you want the instant you demand it, you’ll turn on me and try to crush me. You’re just like everyone else in the world. No one matters but you. (Aiden)”

“Tomorrow you and them will set out for the end of your lives and I’ll be here. The one who gave and would keep on giving if you’d let me. But you don’t want to let me. You and them are going to walk through the valley but you’ll have no shepherd. You’ll have no answers. And you’ll kill the babies. And you’ll die. You ain’t no healer, no more than I am, but I can give more than you.”

“You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you’re changing a patio light bulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you’ll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you’ll be dead.”