“It’s better, Benji, to have something burn brightly for a short time than to never have it at all.”

“I was eight years old when I realized that my G.I. Joe and Optimus Prime were more than friends,” I told her. “Theirs was a forbidden love that dared not speak its name.”“Optimus Prime is a robot,” Jenny said. “Humans and robots can’t be in love.”“Oh,” Sandy groaned. “You shouldn’t have said that.”“Blasphemy!” I hissed at her.“It’s true!” she insisted.“I hope you never have children,” I snapped.”

“I wonder now, with everything said and done, if things would have been different had I remembered what the Tree had told me. Would I have made the same decisions, the same mistakes? Where would I be, had I remembered? Had I listened? I have learned in my short time here on this world that we as humans are all capable of a great many things, our minds able to process so much. Too much, really. But our greatest curse, our greatest folly, if you will, is our ability of hindsight.Of regret.Oh, Seven. How I wish I would have known.”

“He gave me a lot, but it would have never been enough.” He looks thoughtful as he gazes back down at me. “It would never have been enough,” he tells me,” because it would never have been you”

“I’ll never understand why people just won’t let others be who they are. It’s not like it’s affecting them in any way”

“This is my family, and the noise around me is soothing in a way it hasn't been in quite a long time. That's mostly my doing, I know, given my self-imposed exile in the Land of Sorrow. But hearing the overlapping voices and laughter, seeing the bright eyes and smiles, does more for me than I thought it could.”

“Hey, remember when you didn’t know that you wanted Otter to spray his man babies all over your face and we didn’t have to talk about our feelings all the time?” “Yeah, those were the good old days.”