“A lot of people were wounded in our kitchen and in the week of a car less than a mile away. And the life I had before- the one I had hated so much- was in the past.”

“...I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.”

“I must have killed a lot of cows in a past life for Karma to hate me this much.”

“There would be a trial, of course. But I had watched a few trials in Thalia, and I had seen people a lot dumber than Hud get away with a lot worse than what he did.”

“From early childhood, I had been told how smart I was, and throughout my life various people had tried so hard to teach me everything there was to know. But it occurred to me then how negligent they had been in teaching me how to love. I had two example of love in life - my mother's, absolute and over- burdened, the trial of love; and my father's, the cold and ambitious pursuit of meaning in love, the desire to turn it into a product with a worth that could be measured. Of the two options, I had skewed towards the former, disappointed with my father's method, and so I had bestowed a sort of unconditional love on Carly without really understanding what it meant. I wished that just one person had taught me a way to love her less. If I had loved her less, maybe I wouldn't have hated her so much. And maybe then I could have forgiven her.”

“But there was only so much worrying you could do before you just had to accept what life throws at you and move on, because some things were going to be out of your control, and others can’t be fixed or changed. And for everything I’d lost over the last couple of months, I still had a lot. More than I expected, actually.”.”