“I tap a Malediction out of the box, fire it up, and puff. It tastes like a tire fire in a candy factory next door to a strip club. The best cigarettes ever.”

“Ana is convinced she can bake anything.""I can. I'm going to make tarts and you're going to like them."Stef grinned. "If you need help putting out fires, I'm next door.”

“As i thought about all that surgar running through her veins, i imagined it as a kind of liquid candy. But when i asked her if it tasted sweet, she laughed quietly and said no. It stung, she said. But she needed it. She had to have it. All i could imagine was that candied water burning inside my mother. Like an invisible fire that i could not see or taste or touch or stop.”

“I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke a cigarette thinking. I wonder what great things have come from those hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind - and it is only proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”

“A cigarette is like a hamster, harmless until you stick it in your mouth and light it on fire.”

“What's it like here?There's a biscuit factory next door. We get the broken ones.”