“I spent most of my teen years trying to figure out the rules of life, theories for why things happened, why people behaved as they did, and mostly I came to the conclusion that either there were no rules, or the rules sucked. Reading science fiction wasn't about imagining myself into some more exciting life filled with adventure, it was about finding a world where things worked the way I wanted them to.”

“I longed to return to that bloody riverbank, to throw myself in the path of the final arrow, to die ignorant, and so, in love. Better to be killed by an arrow than by the words of the one I most trusted.”

“I envied Elizabeth- but I admired Groot. Because if you truly believed in the lightning bolts, why not do everything in your power to take them for yourself.”

“Chris loved you," I said, and the truth of it was almost a physical pain. She wouldn't look at me. "No he didn't. And he would have figured it out eventually. So would you? Then where would I have been?""Not here.”

“Things fall apart. But things don't just fall apart. People break them.”

“Nobody likes me,” he concluded at the tail end of a ten-minute pity fest.“Can’t imagine why,” Quinn murmured. I turned my snort of laughter into a fake cough,which was an embarrassingly feeble attempt at subterfuge when you consider the fact thatI didn’t have any lungs.”

“I told myself I deserved some good luck, overlooking the fact that it would call for substantially more than luck to thrust me into one of those narratives where plain-Jane new girl catches the eye of inexplicably single Prince Charming, because somehow the new school has revealed her wild, irresistible beauty, of which she was never before aware.”