“I’m exactly right for you, Bella. It would have been effortless for us — comfortable, easy as breathing. I was the natural path your life would have taken… If the world was the way it was supposed to be, if there were no monsters and no magic”

“I could see how easy it would be to fall into loving Bella. It would be exactly like falling: effortless. Not letting myself love her was the opposite of falling—it was pulling myself up a cliff-face, hand over hand, the task as grueling as if I had no more than mortal strength.”

“You were supposed to die. It would have been a good start. (Kessar)I don’t know. I die, you get bored. World ends. Doesn’t really fit, does it? Besides, I can’t make things too easy on you. What’s life without pain? (Sin)”

“… I would have run wild through a magical kingdom and never looked back. Talking animals? Yes. Witches and monsters? Yes. Dark queens? Absolutely. Give it right here. I would have said yes to all of it.”

“He's like a drug for you, Bella. I see that you can't live without him now. It's too late. But I would have been healthier for you. Not a drug; I would have been the air, the sun.”

“It would have been really easy to spiral down into drugs or alcohol that year, for both of us. But instead we were there, together. We’d taken all the bad things that had happened to us and turned them around into something good and bigger than the two of us.”