Because even if the lie is beautiful, the truth is what you face in the end.

A strange thing, words. Once they're said, it's hard to imagine they're untrue.

Don't you miss it?" I say. "Being free."He laughs.

I wish I had a memory of that first violent shove, the shock of cold air, the sting of oxygen into new lungs. Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.

The clouds took on the shape of dancers; from somewhere far off, Pram heard music before the clouds became normal again.

It taught that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.

Felix wasn't sure of his limits, if he had limits. After he'd been dead a while, he began to suspect he could swim to the bottom of the oceans. Beyond that. He suspected that he could swim so far down that he'd eventually go through the center of the earth and come out the other side. He could swim into the clouds, into the stars. Maybe there were ghosts on the other planets. Maybe there were ghosts laughing and splashing each other with the heat of the sun. He wasn't brave enough to find out.

Felix had left his heart buried in the ground years ago, but he felt it crack apart.

I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that I'm touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again.

Jenna, standing in the doorway with her mouth and hand full of shelled pistachios, says, '"Real' is a dirty word in this place'.

Just being alive feels so arduous that all I want to do is climb under the covers and sleep.

Trust is the strongest weapon.

She's been conned, ruined, left for dead, and she's not going to forgive any of it. She will soldier on, if only out of spite.

I don't dare touch her. Loss is a knowledge I'm sorry to have. Perhaps the only thing worse than experiencing it, is watching it replay anew in someone else--all the awful stages picking up like a chorus that has to be sung.

He was now working his way through the many shades of grief. Sadness made everything gray, he'd learned, but there were different types of gray, some darker than others. There were dark spots in his memories he wasn't brave enough to enter.

He looks at me, and I don't know what he sees. I used to think it was Rose. But she's not here with us now, in this room. It's just him and me, and the books. I feel like our lives are in those books. I feel like all the words on the pages are for us.

It's quiet for a while, and then Rowan says; "We could talk now. We're alone out here. No walls.""There are always walls." I say.

And so ends his rush from his greatest act of rebellion. He understands that no matter where he runs or how high he flies, he will always have to come home.

There is no darkness like that of a confined space.

We writers are resilient souls.

This is the real Madame. I can see why she hides herself in accents and gems and exotic perfumes. I can see why she's grown to hate anything to do with love. She isn't evil or corrupt the way that Vaughn is. She's broken. Only broken.

I start trying to stay unconscious. The problem with this is that no amount of willpower can change the reality.

I think he's beginning to understand, and understanding is a horrible thing.

She’s a commodity in a sea of broken girls.

There is a silence so great that I can hear the ice crystals cracking and falling from eyelashes of girls who will never blink again.

We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us—our genes, our bones, our wombs—that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.

We didn't make ourselves," she says. "We aren't the greatest things to exist. I can't believe that. I won't believe that. We have too many faults.

Love unrequited is violent. He loves you so much that he's turned it into hate.

It is the face of a girl who has seen the world, who realizes that it hates her, and who hates it in return.

She knew that the dead hid pieces of themselves in the world. They buried organs in the living. They stuffed memories into trees and clouds and other innocuous things.

Her hair is full of icy wind and daylight. She is every princess, every queen, in the history book.

I still don't know where you came from," he says. "Some days it's like you just fell from the sky.""Some days I feel like I did." I say.

I think humans have always been desperate. I think it has always been about doing something awful if it might help, when the only other option is death. Maybe that's what being a parent is supposed to feel like.

Lovers are weapons, but love is a wound.

You can try to please everyone and risk accomplishing nothing, or go for your dreams and risk pissing a few people off.

My father warned me that you’re an interloper. He told me I should make you leave, since we’re no longer married and you’re not my concern,” he says. The thought gives me a chill. Yes, I’m sure Vaughn would love for his son to abandon me, so that Vaughn can swoop in and reclaim me the second I’m alone. But Linden adds, “I told him that wouldn’t be a good idea either.

Home?' I say. It's a word that can mean anywhere and nowhere.

Wanting to be happy is not stupid.

The madness of youth made me unafraid.

We'll squeeze every second that we can from our lives, because we're young, and we have plenty of years to grow. We'll grow until we're braver. We'll grow until our bones ache and our skin wrinkles and our hair goes white, and until our hearts decide, at last, that it's time to stop.

We're all born an empty page.

His lips are familiar. I know the shape of them, know how to make mine fit against them. His taste is familiar too. For all the illusions and colors and sweet smells... he has always tasted like skin. His breaths are shallow. I'm holding his life against my tongue, between my rows of teeth. He's offering it up.

Pram wasn't told the story of her birth. But even as a very small girl, she felt deep in her chest that she was alive and dead at the same time.

There’s this anomaly that happens sometimes with twins. It occurs in the womb when the fetuses are growing too closely to each other. The stronger twin develops normally, while the weaker twin crumples and is encased by the body of the stronger twin, where it becomes a parasite. The result is a single child, plagued by a twin-shaped fossil inside. Like a tumor.In death Rose became Linden’s parasitic twin. They were two separate organisms once, growing steadily beside each other. Two pulses. Two brains. But she has crumpled and died, and still he carries her inside himself. She goes where he goes, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, a shadow behind his ribs.

I watch the ashes swim around like dandelion puffs, making swirls where bodies and walls once stood.

I think she's brave. I think that nobody has ever believed what she could be capable of. All her life, nobody was listening.

There is a dark place calling to me, but I will not go just yet. I know I can't return from it.

They're making me go to school," Pram said. "I don't think it's a very good idea. I've read about how cruel kids can be.""Are you afraid they'll be cruel, or that being around them for too long will make you cruel?" Felix said."Both, I suppose.

A feeling can't kill you.

She smiles at our husband as she moves, and he blushes, overcome by her beauty. But I know what her smile really means...Her smile is her revenge.

Stone gnomes and angels filled the gardens, and it seemed that they were also sleeping, as though a witch had cast a spell on them.

Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky.

When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.

Maybe it is desperation," I say. "Maybe we can't let things fall apart without trying. We can't let go of the people we love."He looks at me, and in the sunlight his eyes come alive with greens and golds. "Sometimes we can," he says.

They're dead. We're alive. We have things to do.

But there’s no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.

Ah, love. That’s what the world has lost. There’s no more love, only the illusion of it.

It's best to let her go," he says.No, no, that's wrong. It's never right to give up on someone.

‎I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that I'm touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again.

He talks softly, patiently, as I sit on the window ledge and watch boats with colorful triangles for sails scratch the ocean.

I see an ocean that’s spilled out of a wineglass, its body clear and sparkling and folding over itself. I see a ribbon of sand.

This time as we ascend, I watch the world sinking below us. I watch the way the city fades into sand that gets washed by the ocean.

You aren’t crazy,’ he says. ‘What?’ ‘I’ve known you all your life, and you’ve always tried to hide the parts of yourself that you think are wrong. But nothing is wrong with you.’ Those may be the best words he’s ever said to me.

There's a world out there that nobody has bothered to promise her.

Even things that aren't broken can be fixed.

People die, and everything they've ever said just echoes around and around. There's nothing new. Only the same nonsense from their lives.

With free will comes inevitable error and misjudgement

Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide a person.