“And all the nursemaids and kitchen maids I ever knew when I was a child, always had a aunt, who knew a woman, whose first cousin's boy had been put into just such a box, and had never been seen again.”

“My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The child I had been was gone with the child she had been. We were new people, and we didn't know each other anymore. I shook my head desperately.”

“I melted into the dream as if I had always been there. I knew where I had come from; I knew where I was going.”

“I knew then that my future had always been Ren.”

“He was just a sixteen-year old boy who had been killed, a kid whose photo had been in the paper, a kid who would mostly be forgotten by the time the newspaper went into the garbage-yet he was the universe, all the dying, all the crying. He was everyone who had ever died young.”

“The wickedness of the world was a part of creation, I knew this, and the Angel of Death had been created on that day when life first appeared, yet i was embittered, I wept for what i had lost and what the world had lost and would yet lose again.”