“Obsessed? I don't know what the word means. I know there were times when I couldn't think of anything else. I used to stay in every weeknight in the hope that he might get free and call me. It felt like I had a disease I didn't want to get rid of. I suppose that's a definition of obsession, yes.”

“More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to the movies. I am twenty-seven. I don't know what it means to love. I don't want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is.You'd call it the ordeal of freedom, I guess.”

“Someone like my mum would say, Oh, you're just a kid, you don't know what love is.But I didn't think of anything else apart from being with Alicia, and the only time I felt like I was where I wanted to be was when I was with her. I mean, that may as well be love, mightn't it?”

“... Hey, I didn't know you didn't like baloney."I went cold. "I don't like it. I never liked it."Soda just looked at me. "You used to eat it. That's why you wouldn't eat anything while you were sick. You kept saying you didn't like baloney, no matter what it was we were trying to get you to eat.""I don't like it," I repeated.”

“I was trying to go... somewhere. But I kept getting pulled back here. I couldn't stop walking, couldn't stop thinking. About the first time I ever saw you, and how after I couldn't forget you. I wanted to, but I couldn't stop myself. I forced Hodge to let me be the one who came to find you and bring you back to the Institute. And even back then, in that stupid coffee shop, when I saw you with Simon, even then that felt wrong to me-- I should have been the one sitting with you. The one who made you laugh like that. I couldn't get rid of that feeling. That it should have been me. And the more I knew you, the more I felt it-- it had never been like that for me before. I'd always wanted a girl and then gotten to know her and not wanted her anymore, but with you the feeling just got stronger and stronger until that night when you showed up at Renwick's and I knew. And then to find out the reason I felt like that-- like you were some part of me I'd lost and never ever knew I was missing until I saw you again-- that the reason was that you were my sister, it felt like some cosmic joke. Like God was spitting on me. I don't even know for what-- for thinking that I actually get to have you, that I would deserve something like that, to be happy. I couldn't imagine what it was I'd done that I was being punished for--”

“Do you know what it was like kissing Holly and looking up to see you?""What?""You said to begin anywhere."But I hadn't expected that as a beginning, middle or end. I felt my cheeks getting warm. "I guess it was pretty embarrassing for both of us," I said, and walked ahead of him so he wouldn't see my face. "I know, I just kept staring at you.""What were you thinking?""I don't remember.""Don't you start using that line," he chided."Then don't ask me, Nick." Did he suspect how I felt.He caught me and turned me around to face him. I focused on his shirt. "Okay," he said quietly, "I'll tell you what I was thinking. I couldn't believe that I, who was never going to get hooked, had fallen in love with a girl who didn't want to date, and she was watching me kiss somebody else."I glanced up."Your turn, brave girl. What were you thinking?""That Holly looked beautiful in your arms and that you didn't pull away from her the way you had pulled away from me when I kissed you."He drew me to him. "I'm not pulling away again," he said holding me close.”