I love that books allow us to experience other lives without us ever having to change where we live or who we are.

Cripes, just listen to that desperation mixed with a wild joie de vivre. That doesn't come out of nothing. They'll be able to hear that a massive eruption once rocked the world and scattered pain and passion in it's wake.

Cigarettes are called coffin nails for a reason, Billy Boy," I remembered telling him. "Be careful with those things. You're risking your life.

Why can't a girl be smart without it being explained away as a rare supernatural phenomenon?

And all the while Stephen started at me as if I were something magical. Not the ugly way other people sometimes stare at me, like he was meeting someone in a foreign country who spoke his language when no one else could. That's how it's been between us ever since. We understand each other, even when we astound each other.

I believe that 'love' and 'wrong' are two deeply unrelated words that should never be thrown into the same sentence together. Like 'dessert' and 'broccoli.

Come along. Let’s get out of here and go toast to youth and vampires and rebellion.

Surely, though, I must have stolen into the future and landed in an H.G. Wells-style world - a horrific, fantastic society in which people's faces contained only eyes, millions of healthy young adults and children dropped dead from the flu, boys got transported out of the country to be blown to bits, and the government arrested citizens for speaking the wrong words. Such a place couldn't be real. And it couldn't be the United States of America, "the land of the free and the home of the brave." But it was. I was on a train in my own country, in a year the devil designed. 1918.

We were all survivors—every last one of us who limped our way out to the sidewalks that afternoon and spit in Death’s cold face.

The flirty old moon eased his way across the warped and sooty floorboards and kissed my bare toes, turning my feet as luminous as the skin of cinema stars.

Don’t ever worry what the boys who don’t appreciate originality think of you. They’re fools.