“RC blinked a couple more times and admired the freckles on either side of [Honey's] nose. He would have enjoyed connecting them dot-to-dot with a felt-tip pen. In his fantasy, he would discover the meaning of life spread across her cheekbones.”

“What makes people between the ages of eleven and fifteen such mean jerks? I’d rather be ninety-five than thirteen again.”

“The worst things in life are the best things gone bad - Tim Sandlin”

“Depression is like a headache or true love or any of those indefinable concepts. If you've never been there, you don't know what it's like until you're too far in to stop the process.”

“He imagined them sitting somewhere, just enjoying each other's company, her head on his chest, his arm around her. And he realized how desperately lonely he had become.”

“First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rusack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.”

“his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.”