Young adult authors

"When the American deal came through, that meant security. It means that I can buy a flat. It means not worrying. The constant mind-blowing worry of wondering if you are going to be able to last the week without buying another pack of nappies. That is how it was and it is a horrible, horrible way to live."

"The wizards represent all that the true "muggle" most fears: They are plainly outcasts and comfortable with being so. Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit!"

"Hermione was very easy to create because she is based almost entirely on myself at the age of 11. She is really a caricature of me. I wasn't as clever as she is, nor do I think I was quite such a know-it-all, though former classmates might disagree. Like Hermione, I was obsessed with achieving academically, but this masked a huge insecurity."

"I absolutely did not start writing these books to encourage any child into witchcraft. [...] I'm laughing slightly because to me, the idea is absurd."

"I have met thousands of children now, and not even one time has a child come up to me and said, "Ms. Rowling, I'm so glad I've read these books because now I want to be a witch." They see it for what it is [...] It is a fantasy world and they understand that completely. I don't believe in magic, either."

"[On her first marriage] I married on October 16, 1992. I left on November 17, 1993. So that was the duration of what I considered to be the marriage. ... [O]bviously you do not leave a marriage after that very short period of time unless there are serious problems. I'm not the kind of person who bales out without there being serious problems. My relationship before that lasted seven years. I'm a long-term girl. And I had a baby with this man. But it didn't work. And it was clear to me that it was time to go and so I went. I never regretted it."

"Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. [...] It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it's a healthy feeling. It's a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different."

"During the day I was writing in cafés as everyone famously knows, but could I just say for the record once and for all 'cause it's really irritating me: I did not write in cafés to escape my unheated flat, because I am not stupid enough to rent an unheated flat in Edinburgh in midwinter. It had heating. I went out and wrote in café because the way to make Jessica fall asleep was to keep her moving -- in the pushchair. So I used to take her out, tie her out, put her in the pushchair, walk her along -- the moment she fall asleep, into the nearest café and write."

"I've never set out to teach anyone anything. It's been more of an expression of my views and feelings than sitting down and deciding "What is today's message?" And I do think that, although I never, again, sat down consciously and thought about this, I do think judging, even for my own daughter, that children respond to that than to "thought for the day.""

"If you need to tell your readers something … there are only two characters that you can put it convincingly into their dialogue. One is Hermione, the other is Dumbledore. In both cases you accept, it's plausible that they have, well Dumbledore knows pretty much everything anyway, but that Hermione has read it somewhere. So, she's handy."

"I've given you more than I've given anyone else which I probably shouldn't probably say on — on screen, or they'll kidnap and torture him, and we need him."

"The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous. I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales's secretary."

"[Before her success] I totally felt a waste of space. I was lousy. Yes I did, yes. And now I feel that, it turns out there was one thing I was good at, and I'd always expected I could tell a story, and I suppose it's rather sad that I needed confirmation by being published."

"He [Harry] is very much in puberty [...] I just think it is a very confusing time. Yes, he's very confused in a boy way. He doesn’t understand how girls' minds work. [...] Harry, for the first time, does have a relationship of sorts. The emphasis is very much on 'of sorts' . . . That was really fun to write actually. I think you will find it painful. You should find it painful. It is painful but it was such fun to write. Poor Harry! What I put him through."

"I went to the British Book Awards that evening. I bumped into a woman I hadn't seen for nearly three years. The first thing she said to me? "You've lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw you!" "Well," I said, slightly nonplussed, "the last time you saw me I'd just had a baby." What I felt like saying was, "I've produced my third child and my sixth novel since I last saw you. Aren't either of those things more important, more interesting, than my size?" But no — my waist looked smaller! Forget the kid and the book: finally, something to celebrate!"

"Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default."

"Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared."

"Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places. Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters; for without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy."

"One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: "What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality." That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing."

"We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better."

"I think most of us if you were asked to name a very evil regime would think of Nazi Germany. … I wanted Harry to leave our world and find exactly the same problems in the Wizarding world. So you have to the intent to impose a hierarchy, you have bigotry, and this notion of purity, which is a great fallacy, but it crops up all over the world. People like to think themselves superior and that if they can pride themselves on nothing else, they can pride themselves on perceived purity. … The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry, and I think it's one of the reasons that some people don't like the books, but I think that it's a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth."

"No story lives unless someone wants to listen. The stories we love best do live in us forever. So, whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home."

"The world is full of wonderful things you haven’t seen yet. Don’t ever give up on the chance of seeing them."

"The Internet doesn’t just offer opportunities for misogynistic abuse, you know. Penis enlargers can also be bought discreetly."

"How horrible. Voldemort was nowhere near as bad."

"I had a bunch of racists telling me that because Hermione 'turned white' – that is, lost colour from her face after a shock – that she must be a white woman, which I have a great deal of difficulty with. But I decided not to get too agitated about it and simply state quite firmly that Hermione can be a black woman with my absolute blessing and enthusiasm."

"I don't think I've ever wanted magic more."

"If I try harder I might be reincarnated as a lonely virgin hiding behind a cartoon frog."

"Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill"

"If sex isn't real, there's no same-sex attraction. If sex isn't real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn't hate to speak the truth."

"Many, myself included, believe we are watching a new kind of conversion therapy for young gay people, who are being set on a lifelong path of medicalisation that may result in the loss of their fertility and/or full sexual function."

"The long-term health risks of cross-sex hormones have been now been tracked over a lengthy period. These side-effects are often minimised or denied by trans activists."

"'This isn't an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it's time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity."

"What I didn't expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive."

"If you didn't already know — and why should you? — "TERF" is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. ... Ironically, radical feminists aren't even trans-exclusionary — they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women."

"... as a much-banned author, I'm interested in freedom of speech."

"I'm concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility."

"Again and again I've been told to 'just meet some trans people.' I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who's older than I am and wonderful."

"The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law."

"We're living through the most misogynistic period I've experienced....Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now."

"From the leader of the free world's long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of 'grabbing them by the pussy', to the incel ('involuntarily celibate') movement that rages against women who won't give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else."

"I've read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don't have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive."

"It isn't enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves."

"But, as many women have said before me, 'woman' is not a costume. 'Woman' is not an idea in a man's head. 'Woman' is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the 'inclusive' language that calls female people 'menstruators' and 'people with vulvas' strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who've had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it's not neutral, it's hostile and alienating."

"I've been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn't because I'm ashamed those things happened to me, but because they're traumatic to revisit and remember."

"... the scars left by violence and sexual assault don't disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you've made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke — and even I know it's funny — but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven't heard them approaching."

"If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you'd find solidarity and kinship."

"I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I've outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they're most likely to be killed by sexual partners."

"I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe."

"I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death."

"It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags — because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter — scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There's joy, relief and safety in conformity."

"But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode 'woman' as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it."

"None of the gender critical women I've talked to hates trans people; on the contrary. Many of them became interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and they're hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their lives, but who're facing a backlash for a brand of activism they don't endorse."

"The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word "TERF" may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement's seen in decades."

"The last thing I want to say is this. I haven't written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I'm extraordinarily fortunate; I'm a survivor, certainly not a victim."

"I've only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I'm creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people."

"All I'm asking — all I want — is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse."

"I have to assume [they] thought doxxing me would intimidate me out of speaking up for women's sex-based rights. They should have reflected on the fact that I've now received so many death threats I could paper the house with them, and I haven't stopped speaking out. Perhaps, and I'm just throwing this out there, the best way to prove your movement isn't a threat to women, is to stop stalking, harassing and threatening us."

"War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman."

"The law Nicola Sturgeon is trying to pass in Scotland will harm the most vulnerable women in society — those seeking help after male violence/rape and incarcerated women. Statistics show that imprisoned women are already far more likely to have been previously abused."

"The most searing, heartfelt and courageous response yet to Shona Robison's astounding claim in the Scottish parliament that there is no evidence sexual predators "have ever had to pretend to be anything else". Susan, as a fellow survivor, I salute you."

"Critiques of Western cancel culture are possibly not best made by those currently slaughtering civilians for the crime of resistance, or who jail and poison their critics. #IStandWithUkraine"

"A strange new form of temporary blindness has broken out among Scottish politicians. None of them could read placards calling for violence against women while standing inches away from them, yet they were instantly cured when photos of them posing with the signs hit the press."

"Never forget, Sturgeon, her government and supporters have insisted that it is ludicrous to imagine anyone would dress in women's clothes to get access to vulnerable women and girls. Wouldn't happen. Everyone is who they say they are. To question this is hate."

"[To Labour frontbencher Lisa Nandy] You said rapists should be transferred to women's prisons if they self-identify as women."

"Given that you're one of the biggest reasons many women on the Left no longer trust Labour to defend their rights, do you stand by these comments?"

"I've looked around and realised that it has to be someone who can take the hit. And it has to be me. I can afford it."

"This has never been about trans rights. [...] This is about women’s rights and activists' demands to dismantle those rights. I have nothing but profound sympathy for trans women who have experienced male violence. I want trans people to be safe. I just don't want women and girls to be any less safe."

"There is a huge appeal, and I try to show this in the Potter books, to black and white thinking. It's the easiest place to be and in many ways it's the safest place to be. If you take an all-or-nothing position on anything, you will definitely find comrades, you will easily find a community. "I’ve sworn allegiance to this one simple idea." What I've tried to show in the Potter books, and what I feel strongly myself, is that we should mistrust ourselves most when we are certain."

"[In the United States, during the early 2000s, Rowling's books were burned by Evangelical Christians because they were perceived as promoting witchcraft.] Book burners, by definition, have placed themselves across a line of rational debate. There is no book on this planet that I would burn, including books that I do think are damaging. Burning, to me, is the last resort of people who cannot argue."

"[The project eventually became Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997). Rowling's first husband] knew what that manuscript meant to me because at a point he took the manuscript and hid it. That was his hostage. When I realised I was definitely going to go, I would take a few pages of the manuscript into work every day, just a few pages so he wouldn't realise anything was missing, and I would photocopy it. Gradually in a cupboard in the staff room, bit by bit, a photocopied manuscript grew and grew because I suspected that if I wasn’t able to get out with everything he would burn it or take it and hold it hostage. That manuscript meant so much to me and it was the thing that I prioritised saving. The only thing I prioritised beyond that was my daughter but at that point she was still inside me so she was as safe as she can be in that situation."

"There is something about a mass of human beings. There's always an edge in a crowd. Always."

"[Something] I explore in the Potter books [is that] a sense of righteousness is not incompatible with doing terrible things. You know, most of the people in movements that we consider hugely abhorrent, many many many of the people involved in those movements understood themselves to be on the side of righteousness. Believed they were doing the right thing. Felt themselves justified in what they were doing."

"I never sat out to upset anyone. However, I was not uncomfortable with getting off my pedestal, and what has interested me over the last ten years, and certainly in the last few years, the last 2-3 years, particularly on social media: "You've ruined your legacy. Oh, you could have been beloved forever but you chose to say this." And I think you could not have misunderstood me more profoundly."

"I'm sick of this s--- [shit]. This is not a woman. These are #NotOurCrimes."

"Crime statistics are rendered useless if violent and sexual attacks committed by men are recorded as female crimes. Activists are already clamouring for this sadistic killer to be incarcerated in a women’s prison. Ideologically driven misinformation is not journalism."

"When I've asked what the lack of female-only spaces would mean for women of certain faith groups, or survivors of sexual violence, the response is an almighty shrug. Over and again I've heard "no trans person has ever harmed a woman or a girl in a female space", the speakers' consciences apparently untroubled by the fact that they are parroting an easily disprovable lie, because there's ample evidence that men claiming a female identity have committed sexual offences, acts of violence and voyeurism, both inside women's spaces and without. Indeed, the Ministry of Justice's own figures show that there are proportionately more trans-identified males in jail in the UK for sexual offences than among male prisoners as a whole. When this inconvenient fact is raised, I'm sometimes told trans-identified sex offenders "aren't really trans, they're just gaming the system”. Well, yes. That's the point. If a system relies on an unfalsifiable sense of self rather than sex, it's impossible to keep bad faith actors out."

"Kemi Badenoch and I might not agree on a lot, but how often are male politicians called "spiteful"? And what's the issue with her manner? Did she fail in womanly sweetness, kindness and deference?"

"[To Alastair Campbell, former spokesman for Tony Blair, who had commented Badenoch was not speaking about her role as Secretary of State for Business and Trade] Badenoch is also minister for women and equalities. Thanks once again for highlighting Labour's complacency and indifference towards the rights of half the electorate."

"[Rosie Duffield] and I share more than the occasional meal and a fairly sweary WhatsApp thread. Last month, a man received a suspended prison sentence for sending both of us death threats. Rosie was to be taken out with a gun; I was to be beaten to death with a hammer. The level of threats Rosie has received is such that she's had to hire personal security and was recently advised not to conduct in-person hustings. Is this what [[Keir Starmer|[Keir] Starmer]] meant, when he talked about toxic, divided debate? A female MP in his own party being intimidated and harassed? Or was he referencing the activists in black masks who turn up at women’s demonstrations with the declared intention of punching "Terfs", an intention that has more than once translated into action? Was he perhaps thinking of the trans activists who sang "f*** you" over a microphone as women from all over the world queued outside FiLia, the feminist conference, to discuss issues like female genital mutilation? It didn’t seem so. The impression given by Starmer at Thursday’s debate was that there had been something unkind, something toxic, something hard line in Rosie’s words, even though almost identical words had sounded perfectly reasonable when spoken by Blair."

"[Referring to Emma Watson] Like other people who've never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she's ignorant of how ignorant she is."

"Adults can't expect to cosy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend's assassination, then assert their right to the former friend's love, as though the friend was in fact their mother."

"Emma’s 'all witches' speech was a turning point for me, but it had a postscript that hurt far more than the speech itself. Emma asked someone to pass on a handwritten note from her to me, which contained the single sentence: 'I'm so sorry for what you're going through.' She has my phone number. [...] This was back when the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak, at a time when my personal security measures had had to be tightened considerably and I was constantly worried for my family’s safety. Emma had just publicly poured more petrol on the flames, yet thought a one-line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness."

"[From a letter, originally in German, sent to author Gabriele Kuby] It is good that you enlighten us on the Harry Potter matter, for these are subtle seductions that are barely noticeable, and precisely because of that have a deep effect and corrupt the Christian faith in souls even before it could properly grow."

"Amanda Craig, the novelist, has been accused of unkindness and bigotry after signing a letter in support of JK Rowling, who in turn has been ostracised by some former friends and colleagues over her support for women’s rights over gender ideology. Dropped as a competition judge by the women’s literary magazine Mslexia, she was accused of threatening the magazine’s climate of “welcome and inclusivity”. The letter in question objected to ... hate speech towards Rowling."

"The ultimate model for Harry Potter is Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes, published in 1857. The book depicts the Rugby School presided over by the formidable Thomas Arnold, remembered now primarily as the father of Matthew Arnold, the Victorian critic-poet. But Hughes' book, still quite readable, was realism, not fantasy. Rowling has taken Tom Brown's School Days and re-seen it in the magical mirror of Tolkein. The resultant blend of a schoolboy ethos with a liberation from the constraints of reality-testing may read oddly to me, but is exactly what millions of children and their parents desire and welcome at this time."

"In psychoanalytic terms, having projected his childish rage onto the caricature Dursleys, and retained his innocent goodness, Harry now experiences that rage as capable of spilling outward, imperiling his friends. But does this mean Harry is growing up? Not really. The perspective is still child's-eye. There are no insights that reflect someone on the verge of adulthood. Harry's first date with a female wizard is unbelievably limp, filled with an 8-year-old's conversational maneuvers."

"Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing secondary worlds. Ms. Rowling's world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children's literature."

"We did not intend to suggest that JK Rowling was transphobic or that she should be boycotted. We accept that our comparisons of JK Rowling to people such as Picasso, who celebrated sexual violence, and Wagner, who was praised by the Nazis for his antisemitic and racist views, were clumsy, offensive and wrong. Debate about a complex issue where there is a range of legitimate views should have been handled with much more sensitivity and more obvious recognition of the difference between fact and opinion. We unreservedly apologise to JK Rowling for the offence caused, are happy to retract these false allegations and to set the record straight. We shall be making a financial contribution to a charity of JK Rowling’s choice."

"Last year, initially The Scotsman newspaper — being Scottish and J. K. Rowling being Scottish [sic] — and because of the English tendency to try and tear down their idols, they kept trying to build stories which said J. K. Rowling ripped off Neil Gaiman. They kept getting in touch with me and I kept declining to play because I thought it was silly. And then The Daily Mirror in England ran an article about that mad woman who was trying to sue J. K. Rowling over having stolen muggles from her. And they finished off with a line saying [something like]: And Neil Gaiman has accused her of stealing. Luckily I found this online and I found it the night it came out by pure coincidence and the reporter's e-mail address was at the bottom of the thing so I fired off an e-mail saying: This is not true, I never said this. You are making this up. I got an apologetic e-mail back, but by the time I'd gotten the apologetic e-mail back it was already in The Daily Mail the following morning and it was very obvious that The Daily Mails research consisted of reading The Daily Mirror. And you're going: journalists are so lazy."

"J.K. Rowling, thinking of a name of white character: Albus Dumbeldore, Hermione Granger, Minerva McGonagall. J.K. Rowling, thinking of nonwhite character: Cho Chang"

"I didn't feel she ripped me off, as some people did, though she could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn't one of them."

"This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views."

"[N]othing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic. She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing. There is no evidence that she is putting trans people "in danger," as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist."

"When Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling published the piece "TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) Wars" on her blog in the summer of 2020, she specifically mentioned her fear that many transgender men are actually Autistic girls who weren't conventionally feminine, and have been influenced by transactivists on the internet into identifying out of womanhood. In presenting herself as defending disabled "girls," she argued for restricting young trans Autistic people's ability to self-identify, and access necessary services and health care. Rowling's perspective (which she shares with many gender critical folks) is deeply dehumanizing to both the trans and Autistic communities. We're fully fledged, complex people, who are entitled to the same body autonomy and self-determination as anyone else."

"The golden rule of writing is to write what you care about. If you care about your topic, you'll do your best writing, and then you stand the best chance of really touching a reader in some way."

"I had to ask, "Is it a true story, Aunt Charlotte?" Aunt Charlotte looked at me without saying anything for a while. Then she said, "I've told you my story. What you believe is up to you, Marguerite.""

"They looked like business cards. Instead of a printed name, a filigreed gold line wrapped itself in a design in the middle of each white rectangle.:"What are they?" Selene asked. "Wishes," said the elf prince. "You've got three. Just make a wish and burn a card. It doesn't"-- he looked her over with contempt --"require a college education." "Thanks, but no, thanks," said Selene, handing the cards back. She'd read about people who were offered three wishes my malevolent spirits. No matter what they wished, something terrible happened. She looked carefully at the man. Behind the nice suit and tie, he was just as she thought a malevolent spirit might appear. "What do you mean, 'Thanks, but no, thanks'? They are perfectly good wishes, I assure you. They're not cheap 'wish for Popsicles' wishes, young woman. They are very high quality. Here." He pushed them towards her. "Wish for anything. Go ahead." "I wish for peace on earth," Selene said, and sneaked a look over her shoulder. Her bus was coming up the street, but still two blocks away. "That's not a thing!" snarled the elf prince. "That's an idea, that's a concept. I didn't say wish for a concept. I said a thing. A material object. Go on." Selene stood her ground. "I'd rather not.""

"The jam is from my mother's pantry." "Oh, does your mother live far from here?" "Not far," he responded, "as the crow flies."

"The factory doesn't like to hear too much talk about things it doesn't believe in. Contrary to what you may have heard, the factory has never found a single problem caused by ghosts. So if you meet any ectoplasmic spirits up there in the high crane, I suggest you be polite and they'll probably be polite right back. You're up there alone for fourteen hours a day, and you might find it's nice to have someone to talk to."

""And we never get any older. Richie and Alex will always be ten. My sister and Todd will always be newlyweds. Angela will always be two. And I will always be the only one with no one my age to talk to." "You have me to talk to," pointed out John. Edwina smiled. "You aren't afraid to talk to ghosts?" "Not at all." John realized the truth as he said it."

"Mother said she couldn't guess what was worse, to be a two-year-old with a cold forever or to live with a two-year-old with a cold forever."

""I can steal anything." "So you claimed. It was a wager to that effect that landed you in prison." He picked a pen nib off the desk behind him and turned it in his hands for a moment. "It is too bad for you that intelligence does not always attend gifts such as yours, and fortunate for me that it is not your intelligence I am interested in, but your skill. If you are as good as you say you are." I repeated myself. "I can steal anything." "Except yourself out of the king's prison?" the magus asked, lifting one eyebrow this time. I shrugged. I could do that, too, but it would take time."

""...Everything about you reveals your low birth. You'd never be comfortable at the court." "I'd be famous." "Oh, you're already that, Gen," he said pityingly."

""You can always give me some of Ambiades's food." The magus gave me an ugly look. "You'll get your share and nothing else. No one's going hungry so that you can eat." :"I don't see why not," I said as I lay down on the grass for a nap. It had dried in the sumer sun to crakling stalks that poked me in the arms and neck. "I'm a lot more important than anyone else here," I told the blue sky above me."

"Ambiades, I realized, was the kind of person who liked to put people in a hierarchy, and he wanted me to understand that I was at the bottom of his. He was supposed to treat me politely in spite of my subservient position, and I was supposed to be grateful. For my part, I wanted Ambiades to understand that I considered myself a hierarchy of one. I might bow to the superior force of the magus and Pol, but wasn't going to bow to him. Neither of us moved."

"Neither the king's reward nor Pol could stop me, but I wanted to be a kingmaker myself. I wanted to be the first one to steal Hamiathes's Gift in hundreds and hundreds of years. I wanted to be famous. Only I couldn't steal the damned thing if I didn't know where if was, and only the magus could find it for me. I would stay with him until he led me to the stone, but I promised myself that someday I would stick a sharp knife into his arrogance and give it a good twist."

""Surely I am a better mistress to serve?" "You are more beautiful, Your Majesty." The queen smiled again before I finished. "But she is more kind." So much for discretion. The smile disappeared. You could have heard a pin drop onto the stone floor as her alabaster cheeks flushed red. No one could ever accuse the queen of Attolia of being kind."

"With my good hand I reached under the braid at the base of my neck to free the thong that was tied there. It was the shorter of the two that Pol had given me on the banks of the Aracthus. One-handed, I couldn't easily get the knot undone, and several strands of my own dark hair came with the thong when I pulled it free. I glanced back briefly at the magus and was delighted to see his mouth open in astonishment. "Gen," he said under his breath, "you viper." Above the queen's extended palm I held Hamiathes's Gift. It had hung hidden in my hair since I'd braided it there after first fighting in the Sea of Olives."

""Gen-" Sophos started to ask another question, but I interrupted him. "No," I said, "not Gen. Eugenides from now on. I never, never, want to hear Gen again in my life." The magus laughed while I shook my head. "You haven't spent any time in the king's prison," I said. "And you haven't had to drink your way through every disreputable wineship in the city of Sounis. I cannot tell you how sick I have been of cheap wine and of being dirty. Of talking with my mouth half closed and chewing with it open. Of having bugs in my hair and being surrounded by people who think Archimedes was the man at the circus last year who could balance four olives on his nose." The magus looked around the books piled in my study. "I remember that Archimedes. I think it was five olives," he said with a straight face. "I don't care if it was twelve," I said."

"I don't know how he would have gotten out of the prison on his own," said the magus. "It seems a foolhardy plan to have relied on my intervention."

"I am a master of foolhardy plans, I thought. I have so much practice I consider them professional risks. Sooner or later they would have needed the cell and the chains for someone more important, the minister of the exchequer, for instance, and I would have been moved to another cell. Sooner or later I would have had my chance to escape, if I hadn't died of disease first."

"He couldn't have found the whereabouts of the stone from the papers in my study," the magus went on. "I was careful to destroy any records. But he could have followed us and stolen the Gift once it was located."

"The minister of war snorted. "Not if he had to follow you on a horse," he said."

"The queen laughed, and I flushed in the privacy of my bedroom. I do hate horses. That was the first sign that I wasn't going to be the soldier my father hoped for."

"The magus might have heard me thinking. "He does have other skills to be proud of," he said. For instance, I thought, stealing Hamiathes's Gift not once but twice. Who else in history had done that? But the magus referred to the fight with the Queen's Guard at the base of the mountain. That wasn't a skill I appreciated much. If I'd been as inept with a sword as I was in a saddle, my father might not have driven me so hard to be a soldier and to let the title of King's Thief lapse forever. It had been meaningless for so many generations, and he'd felt strongly that it should disappear for good."

"The magus described the fighting with the guard in detail and made me look very good indeed."

"The minister of war snorted. The magus didn't recognize this as high praise, and he said stiffly, "I've been told that his father wanted him to be a soldier. I'd be happy to inform his father that he has a son to be proud of.""

"I stifled a snort of my own in the silence that followed. The magus must have still been tired. He must have once known, but forgotten, that the minister of war had married the daughter of the previous King's Thief. He was talking to my father. The magus might have remembered this, might have recognized me from the first time he'd seen me in Sounis, but we had never been introduced. When he'd come with Sounis's marriage proposals, I had been sulking in my rooms."

"While the magus, realizing his error, was trying to word an apology, my father came to look in at me. "I thought I heard you laughing up your sleeve," he said."

"If you want to keep something safe from thieves, hide it carefully and keep a close watch over it."

"Be cautious," said the other. "Do not offend the gods."

"The second night you repeated the same words over and over. I think the fever had set in by then. Do you remember what you said? "No." She knew every one of them. His voice, broken and stumbling, had filled her dreams until she had wept in her sleep, crying tears for him that she'd never been able to cry for her father or for herself. "Oxe Harbrea Sacrus Vax Dragga..." she began. Eugenides's chin lifted as he recognized the opening words. "It's the invocation of the Great Goddess at her spring festival," he said calmly, "calling her to the aid of those that need her. Those words are archaic."

"We invoke the Great Goddess in our hour of need for her wisdom and her mercy," Teleus said in the demotic. "Ere translates as love, a rather ruthless love, not mercy, Teleus. The Great Goddess of Eddis not known for her mercy."

"I'll be your minister--" "Of the exchequer? You'd rob me blind." "I would never steal from you," he'd said hotly. "Oh? Where is my tourmaline necklace? Where are my missing earrings?" "That necklace was hideous. It was the only way to keep you from wearing it." "My earrings?" "What earrings?"

"How could you come once a week to talk about the weather and not mention a war?" Eddis sighed. "Will you sit down and stop shouting?" "I'll stop shouting. I won't sit down. I might need to throw more inkpots."

"It matters, because I can't do anything more for this country, and it matters," he yelled as he threw the papers back to his desk, "because I only have one hand and it isn't even the right one!"

"I can't steal things without two hands," Eugenides said bitterly. "That's why she cut one off." The queen of Attolia was only ever "she." The name Attolia rarely passed his lips, as if Eugenides couldn't bear the taste of the word in his mouth. "There are a lot of things that a person with two hands couldn't steal," Eddis said. "So?" "Surely if it's impossible to steal them with two hands, it's no more impossible to steal them with one. Steal peace, Eugenides. Steal me some time."

""Eugenides," he said. He had recognized the voice. "Yes." "What have you done?" "Not much yet," answered the Thief from the darkness. "I remain fairly limited in my physical activities." He held up his right arm, and the magus started before realizing that the hand he saw had to be a wooden one, concealed by a glove. Another booming explosion filled the air, and the magus turned back to the window but could see only a glare reflecting on the whitewashed walls of the buildings below. "I had to send someone else to light the fuses," Eugenides said behind him. "Fuses?" asked the magus, with a sick feeling. "In the powder magazines of your warships," Eugenides explained. "Powder magazines?" "You sound like the chorus in a play," said Eugenides. "And the play is a tragedy, I suppose?" "A farce," Eugenides suggested, and the magus winced."

""You said I should do something." Eugenides smiled in the dark, twisting the knife of his revenge a little deeper into the magus. "I did?" "As you were leaving, after your extremely edifying visit in the spring. You said ‘You could still do something.’ Your exact words." "I meant talk your queen into surrendering, not destroy our navy in its own harbor!" the magus shouted."

""I didn't come to Sounis to blow up His Majesty's warships. I told you someone else had to do that." "What did you come for if not to murder my king?" "I came to steal his magus." "You can't," said the magus in question. "I can steal anything," Eugenides corrected him. "Even with one hand." He took a step forward into the moonlight and waggled his fingers. The smile on his face made the magus feel worse, not better."

"Think of it as stealing not you but the king's faith in you." "And what happens to me without the king's faith?" "If you're smart, you leave Sounis," said Eugenides. "Quickly."

"The moon disappeared behind a cloud. Eugenides was only a dark form against the darker water behind him. "Before you make a decision," he said, "I want you to know that I love you.""

"He could tell her he loved her. He ached to shout it out loud for the gods and everyone to hear. Little good it would do. Better to trust in the moon's promises than in the word of the Thief of Eddis. He was famous in three countries for his lies."

"The Thief leaned close to the queen to speak almost in her ear. "From shadow queen to puppet queen in one rule," he whispered. "That's very impressive. When he rules your country, and tells you he loves you, I hope you believe him." He anticipated her blow and leaned back. Her hand only brushed his cheek in an entirely unsatisfying manner. "At least that's one lie I didn't tell you," Eugenides said."

"And now we wait," she said, not bothering to hide her smile of delighted anticipation as her guards conveyed the messenger out of the door. "Wait for what?" the Mede asked. "Hmm?" Attolia focused herself on the present. "Good heavens, I don't know," she said. "Eddis produces such lovely threats when her Thief is concerned."

"Nahuseresh, if there is one thing a woman understands, it is the nature of gifts. They are bribes when threats do not avail." The queen shook her head. "The problem with bribes, Nahuseresh, is that after your money is gone, threats still do not avail."

"They are mice, Nahuseresh, hiding in their mouseholes, hoping their own familiar cat will come home to drive you away. At least when I hang people from castle walls, it is because they are traitors, not because they drive hard bargains. You seem willing to hang anyone who is displeasing to you. How kind of you to show my barons that if I am a hard ruler to cross, you are a worse one to serve. I must thank you for that as well as your emperor's gold. They will be most mousy and well behaved for months."

""Treachery," said the Mede. "Diplomacy," said Attolia, "in my own name," as the rest of her guard rose up from the grass behind their captain."

"You don't understand your weakness, if you think the greater nations will protect you. We will see how much longer you rule your backwater, Your Majesty. You will soon enough discover the limits of your resources." "Will I? I think you underestimate me still, Nahuseresh. While we are being forthright with each other, I admit I find it tedious."

"Eddis looked at her minister, curious. "Your head?" she asked. Attolia explained. "He had to be forcibly dissuaded from strangling his son." "So have we all from time to time," Eddis said seriously."

"He looks--" Attolia hunted for the word. "Defenseless" came to mind, but it wasn't the one she wanted, nor was "young," though he looked even younger when he was asleep. "Quite guileless," she said at last. "Oh, yes," said Eddis. "I'm always willing to forgive him anything - until he wakes up."

"If it is an affliction, it is as you said: The gods know me so well they can predict my behavior. They don't control it. They could know I would love her, but they don't make me. I've watched her for years, you know. All those times when you didn't know where I went, mostly it was to Attolia."

"...She's like a prisoner inside stone walls, and every day the walls get a little thicker, the doorways a little narrower." "And?" Eddis prompted. "Well," said Eugenides, "it's a challenge."

"Least said, soonest mended isn't the advice for every occasion, Your Majesty, isn't the advice for every occasion."

"He lies to you?" Attolia asked. "Constantly," said Eddis. "He lies to himself. If Eugenides talked in his sleep, he'd lie then, too." Attolia looked stunned. "And you can't tell?" Eddis thought for a moment. "I sometimes believe his lies are truth, but I have never mistaken his truth for a lie. If he needs me to believe him, he has his own way of showing his veracity."

"You must choose now. Between the two of us we can reach a treaty without a wedding. You don't have to marry him, but if you choose to marry him, you have to believe him." Attolia turned, and Eddis thought that behind her mask the queen might be afraid, and so she finished lightly. "You have to believe him, because he's going to have you entire palace up in arms and your court in chaos and every member of it from the barons to the boot cleaners coming to you for his blood, and you are going to have to deal with it." Attolia smiled. "You make him sound like more trouble than he's worth." "No," said Eddis thoughtfully. "Never more than he is worth."

"Nothing mortals make lasts; nothing the gods make endures forever."

"Unable to guess the answer, she asked, "Who am I, that you should love me?" "You are My Queen," said Eugenides. She sat perfectly still, looking at him without moving as his words dropped like water into dry earth. "Do you believe me?" he asked. "Yes," she answered. "Do you love me?" "Yes." "I love you." And she believed him."

"The queen turned back to face him. "I could hang you," she said. Eugenides looked up at her. "You missed your chance for that," he said."

"Your Majesty," he asked innocently, "is it true that your cousins once held you down in a water cache?" Ornon, in the act of putting down his wine cup, paused. "Is it also true that they wouldn't let you out until you agreed to repeat insults about your own family?"

"The dandified Attolian who had spoke, a patron, but not a baron by any means, glanced at the queen to see if she approved, but she was looking the other way. The king shrugged his shoulders slightly and said, "I could send you to ask them." The man laughed. "It would be a long trip, Your Majesty. I would so much rather hear the answer from you." "Oh, the trip would be much quicker than you think," said the king pleasantly. "Most of my male cousins are dead." The silence that had begun at the head table had spread to the edges of the hall. The Attolian's smile grew uncertain. The king didn't smile back. Those who understood shifted uncomfortably in their seats."

""The court is watching," she pointed out. "I thought you wanted me more exposed to the public eye?" he teased. "I reverse myself," she said coldly, "and argue for a little circumspection." She tugged at his hand, but he didn't release her. She gave up, unwilling to be seen trying to pull away. "You don't think I can do it." She didn't think he could. "I don't care what they think." She knew that. It worried her. "No," said the queen, but she wavered. He sensed it and smiled. "Am I king?" he asked, irrepressibly. It was the one argument she was in no position to deny. She wanted him to be king, and he was resisting it with all his will."

"Why were these the only dances you knew?" "Because no one would dance with me. Thieves are never popular." I know why, thought Attolia, but aloud she asked, "Why are you familiar with the square dances?" The music quickened. "My mother taught me. We danced them on the rooftops of the Megaron. According to legend, the Thief and any partner the Thief chooses will be safe." "You are king now," she pointed out. "Ah, but they say that if the king dances, the entire court can safely dance with him." "Spare me," said Attolia, "and my court, from dancing on the roof." "It probably only works in Eddis."

"As Attolia spun, she felt a tug at her hair and, turning back, felt another. Then she felt her carefully arranged hair slipping down her neck. Eugenides, minding the pattern with his feet and spinning the queen with one hand, had been pulling out her hairpins one by one when her back was turned. The rest of the pins loosened, and her hair dropped free. It swung out as she spun and the last of the pins bounced and slid across the marble floor. The queen was several inches taller than Eugenides, and he leaned back to counter her spin. To those watching, it didn't seem possible that he could succeed, but with one hand, and no visible effort, he defied the laws of the natural world. Phresine, the queen's senior attendant, watched them from behind the throne as her queen danced like a flame in the wind, and the mercurial king like the weight at the center of the earth. Faster and faster they moved, never faltering, until the music shrilled at an impossible tempo and the pattern gave way to a long spin, each dancer reaching in with one hand and out with the other, holding tight lest they fall away from the other, until the music stopped abruptly and the dance ended."

"The king paused. "Your master of spies is a liar, and this time he is lying," the king said slowly, "to you." Attolia frowned, then almost imperceptibly shook her head. "Have him arrested," said the king. After another pause he added unequivocally, "Now." If he succeeds in having me killed, you could be the next Captain of the Guard. What, then, if the king destroyed Relius? Who would replace him? Costis hardly breathed. The king hadn't ordered the arrest himself, though he could have, but he had directed the queen to do so, in public. Now they would see if the queen could protect her own or not."

"For a moment Costis could see, not so much what was hidden but that there were things hidden that the king did not choose to reveal. Things that were not for Costis to see. There was no understanding him, but Costis knew he would march into hell for this fathomless king, as he would for his queen. So long, he worried, as they didn't order him in opposite directions at the same time. What he would do when that happened, Costis couldn't guess."

"The king lifted a hand to her cheek and kissed her. It was not a kiss between strangers, not even a kiss between a bride and groom. It was a kiss between a man and his wife, and when it was over, the king closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the hollow of the queen's shoulder, like a man seeking respite, like a man reaching home at the end of the day."

""Yet you prefer his mercy to my justice." She meant from the king. She knew where the message had come from."

"As the queen raged at him, he responded, first calmly, then with his own heat. "Is there no one that you will see punished?" the queen shouted. "Are you fond of Teleus now that you preserve his life at all costs?" "I only asked you to reconsider." "There is nothing to reconsider!" "You know why I need him." "Not anymore," the queen declared with finality. The king ignored the finality. "Now more than ever," he insisted. "He has failed-" "That was not entirely his fault!" "Then you will unmake my decisions?" Attolia dared him to try. "You said that I could," Eugenides flatly replied. Pushed too far, the queen lashed out. The king made no effort to avoid the blow. His head snapped around and his forehead struck the doorjamb. He staggered and caught himself. By the time he opened his eyes, she was at the door and then she was gone."

""Who knows but that you will get up to find that the world has inverted itself yet again?" He looked around the room at the other attendants as if in warning, but spoke to Philologos. "Remember, the love of kings and queens is beyond the compass of us lesser mortals." If anyone noticed, no one commented that he had called the Thief of Eddis a king."

"He looked up from the where he had been carefully smoothing the embroidered cover, and seeing his face, Costis felt the shock like a physical blow. If Attolia could look like a queen, Eugenides was like a god revealed, transformed into something wholly unfamiliar, surrounded by the cloth-of-gold bedcover like a deity on an altar, passionless and calculating."

"He had seen a temple fall once, in an earthquake. Small gaps had appeared between the stones, and these had grown until each separate stone tottered in opposition to the ones below. First the columns supporting the porches and then the walls had tumbled down. So, piece by piece, did the king hammer out the enormity of the disaster Sejanus had precipitated on his house."

"I wouldn't destroy an entire house to destroy one man. But I would destroy a man to destroy a house."

"The king, the master of the fates of men, before their eyes was reduced to a man, very young himself, and in love."

"A story?" Phresine was surprised. "What makes you think I can tell stories?" "Insight," said the king. "Go on."

"He didn't marry you to become king. He became king because he wanted to marry you."

"Grown more confident of the queen's humor, Relius said, "I had not pictured you for a fishwife." "Lo, the transforming power of love.""

"Will you serve me and my god?" "I will, Your Majesty." "Then come out," said the king, helping him, "knowing that you'll never die of a fall unless the god himself drops you."

"I think he was delighted to see you safe," said the magus, "and grieved that the next time you meet, it must be as king and king and not as friends."

"He was confident, I think, of the success over both Eddis and Attolia right up until the world heard that the Thief of Eddis had stolen the queen of Attolia and meant to marry her."

"I'd suggested eating it before we left the market. I'd also suggested eating it on the road. I was not so comfortable with my new authority that I could say, "We eat the chicken now!" but the magus had seen that I was considering it."

"Everything, it seemed, depended on gold. The magus and I had fallen easily back into our old habits. He lectured constantly, and I asked questions to my heart's delight. Where he had once been my master and I his apprentice, I had become king and he my sole advisor. Where we had once focused on natural history and philosophy, we now concentrated on administration, taxation, and the prosecution of war. He had begun his lessons by quoting the duke of Melfi: "To make war you need three things: one, money; two, money; and three, money." He went on to tell me the things I should have known already, that I would have known if I had been a more promising heir to the throne and not exclusively interested in poetry."

"You eat more than Gen did after prison", he said. "I have more sympathy with him all the time. Are you going to finish that drumstick?" I asked. "I am. Stop staring at it."

"The magus and I had talked for many long hours about this marriage of Eugenides and the queen of Attolia. The magus insisted it was Eugenides's choice and his desire as well, but it was impossible to know whose influence would prevail and if Gen would grow more like his wife, or his wife like her king."

"Then, as you well know, Eugenides looked me in the eye as if I were a complete stranger and said, "The simplest way to end a war is to admit you have lost it." The silence after that was not polite."

"Would I be wrong," Sounis asked one evening as he walked with Eddis, "to think that I talk to you, you talk to Gen, and Gen talks to Attolia, who talks to the magus, who talks to me?" Eddis laughed. "Not always. Sometimes, as in this case, someone approaches my Eddisian ambassador Ornon, here in Attolia, and he talks to me, I talk to you, you talk to Attolia, Attolia talks to Gen, and he talks to me." "I see you appear in that progression twice." "Oh, more than that, because after Gen talks to me, the process reverses. He goes back to Attolia, who talks to you, who go to the magus, who repeats the information to me, who gives it to Ornon, who takes it back to whoever started this particular political ball rolling in the first place."

"Eddis nodded. "Gen leaves the reins in Attolia's hands. Which is not what either I or Attolia recommended, but wisely he ignored us both." "Wisely?" Smiling, Eddis said, "He hasn't the temperament. He gets angry. She only ever gets angry at him." Sounis, having seen the Thief of Eddis lose his temper, could see her point."

""Sophos, you sleep with a knife under your pillow? I'm hurt." "I'm sorry," said Sounis, blinking, afraid that he had made contact with his wild swing. "I was joking. Wake up the rest of the way, would you?" "Gen, it's the middle of the night." "I know," said the king of Attolia."

"Don't you trust my palace security?" "Yes, of course," Sounis said, trying to think of some other reason besides mistrust to sleep with a knife. He heard Eugenides laugh. "My queen and I sleep with a matched set under our pillows, as well as handguns in pockets on the bedposts. Don't be embarrassed." :"Gen, what are you doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night?" Sounis asked. "Going out of my mind," said Eugenides promptly. "At least I am on the verge of going out of my mind."

"You bastard," said Sounis wearily. "I don't know why I don't stab you here in this alley so I can be the annux over Sounis and Attolia." They were twisting through the narrowest of passages, with Eugenides still in the lead, turning on what seemed to be a whim from one walkway to the next. "Well, the stabbing would be unkind," said Eugenides, "but you can have the annux part with my goodwill." "Not Attolia's." "True," said the king. "Better not stab me."

""I know exactly when. I was hiding in a takima bush in the Queen's Garden, watching the older son of the Baron Erondites tell Attolia that he loved her. He was trying to propose a marriage and she thought he was talking about a poem he was writing. I was laughing like a very quiet fiend, trying not to make the branches around me shake, and then, between one heartbeat and the next, and to my complete surprise, it wasn't funny anymore." He rubbed his chest, as if a remembered pain. "I wanted to kill him. Once she was gone, I very nearly jumped out of the bush onto his head. Poor Dite." Poor Eugenides, thought Sounis, to fall in love with a woman he had already made into an enemy."

""When you stop fussing," Gen had said, slipping to his knees beside her couch, "I will sleep with two knives under my pillow." Attolia had looked down at him and said sharply, "Don't be ridiculous." Only when Eugenides laughed had Sounis realized her implication: If she ever turned against Eugenides, a second knife wouldn't save him."

"I seem to remember once sharing my oatmeal with you," Sounis remarked. "I seem to remember stealing your oatmeal," said the former Thief of Eddis, "but it didn't have sand in it." "Sand?" said Sounis, taken aback. "Sand, and if my queen notices, she will have someone flayed."

"Inside the case was a dueling pistol, a king's weapon, wheel-locked, chased in gold. Eddis had seen it earlier that day. When Sounis lifted it out and tipped his head over the locking mechanism, she knew he was reading the letters inscribed there: Onea realia. "The queen made me.""

"You have heard the queen's advice. My gift is below. Would you wait to see it until you have decided what you will do with hers?"

"Do you warn him not to offend the gods?" "There was no need," said Attolis, smiling, "He couldn't offend the gods with a pointed stick."

"In the shocked aftermath, I said, "We'll give them a second chance." With my right hand, I reached to the other pocket. I had known as soon as I lifted the false bottom of the gun case and looked underneath what it meant. I had tried without ceasing to find some alternative to Attolia's ruthless advice, and I had failed. Gen's fit reassured me that I had not failed for lack of trying. He had seen no other solution himself. I lifted out the matching gun and read the archaic inscription. Realisa onum. Not "The queen made me," but "I make the king.""

"Staring at me over the barrel of my gun, Akretenesh said, "Did you not just days ago lecture me about the sacred truce?" With my finger still through the trigger guard of the spent pistol, I lifted my left palm upward to the sky to see if lightning struck me down. When none did, I smiled again. "We will have to assume the gods are on my side." "I am an ambassador," Akretenesh warned me, anger bringing his confidence back. "You cannot shoot." "I don't mean to," I reassured him, still smiling. I adopted his soothing tones. "Indeed, you are the only man I won't shoot. But if I aimed at anyone else, it might give others a dangerously mistaken sense of their own safety." I raised my voice a trifle, thought it wasn't really necessary. "We will have another vote, Xorcheus." They elected me Sounis. It was unanimous."

""Ten thousand!" I shouted at the walls, back in the room with the wooden shutters, now open so that anyone could hear me, on the porch or probably across the compound. "That arrogant bastard landed ten thousand men at Tas-Elisa. In my port! Mine!" When I was a child and playmates snatched my toys out of my hands, I tended to smile weakly and give in. Years later I was acting the way I should have as a child. Probably not the most mature behavior for a king, but I was still cursing as I swung around to find a delegation of barons in the doorway behind me. My father, Baron Comeneus, and the Baron Xorcheus among them. They thought it was how a king behaved."

"Eschewing ceremony, Eugenides said, "You shot their ambassador?" "You gave me the gun," protested Sounis. "I didn't mean for you to shoot an ambassador with it!" Eugenides told him. "Oh, how our carefully laid plans go astray," murmured the magus. "You shut up!" said Gen, laughing."

"In my experience, the more you know of the gods, the more you know what you cannot understand."

"If a man who claims to see the future is a fool, how much more so, the man who believes he can control it? We think we steer the ship of fate, but all of us are guided by unseen stars."

"Emily: Well, when he's in port, it's actually very tiny – about as big as my hand. And he keeps it on his mantel, in a bottle. He showed it to me once when he came to visit."

"Barney:He's become a lot more dangerous of late. And he has a lot more ears than he used to. Rhapsody:Oh dear. And he wasn’t all that attractive to begin with."

"Achmed Come with us if you want to live."

"Grunthor replaced his helmet and turned to Rhapsody. He took one look at the expression on her face and roared with laughter. "'Allo, darlin'. Oi'm so glad to see it's love at first sight for you, too. Come along." He walked away into the night."

"Rhapsody: It's just that, well, in my limited experience, Firbolg are thought of as monsters. Grunthor: And in my not-so-limited experience, Lirin are thought of as appetizers."

"Achmed: This is Grunthor. No one has concealed that. Grunthor: Although you can always call me 'The Ultimate Authority, to Be Obeyed at All Cost.' My troops always does."

"Rhapsody: "I can sit watch. I have a dagger." Achmed: "Well, I for one will sleep much better now knowing you're protecting us, Rhapsody. Try not to hurt any small animals that might attack unless they're edible.""

"Between shallow breaths she began to mutter a string of inspired curses more vile than either of the men remembered hearing, much to Grunthor's delight."

"Young Rhapsody: What did you put in the water this time? Rhapsody's mother: Sit all the way down. Lavender, lemon verbena, rose hips, snow fern- Young Rhapsody: Snow fern? We eat that! Rhapsody's mother: "Exactly. Why do you think the water is so warm? I'm not bathing you, I'm making soup."

"Stop that immediately," he ordered harshly. "I forbid you to do that. If you want to come with us, you had best understand that you are never to do that again. Weeping and wailing is banned from here on out. Now decide. Come if you want to – if you can refrain from that noise."

"Rhapsody:"I’m Lirin-" Grunthor:"'Ey, don't remind me. Oi ain't eaten recently.""

"Rhapsody’s father: The water won't hurt you, it's the panic that will. Stay calm."

"Rhapsody father: "Panic will kill you, even when nothing else wants to."

"Grunthor: Well, 'allo, Duchess! Oi was 'opin you'd drop in! Care for a spot o' tea?"

"Grunthor: It's enough just to know that you fell for me."

"Achmed: She's a Singer; she may be prescient. Grunthor:"She certainly is, cute lit'le thing. Oi like 'er."

"Achmed: How noble are you feeling, Grunthor? Grunthor: "Oi'm always noble, sir; it's in my blood. 'As been ever since Oi ate that knight a few years back."

"Grunthor: Well, sir, if we can't find work when we get out o' this stinkin' 'ole, maybe 'Er Ladyship 'ere will teach us some tunes and we can go on the road as a team of wanderin' troubadours. Oi can see it now: Doctor Uchmed's Travelin' Snake Show.""

"Rhapsody: You know, you both really ought to have more respect for music. It can be a very powerful weapon, as well as whatever else you need it to be." Grunthor: That's true; my singin' voice can be quite good at inflictin' pain. At least that's what the troops use ta tell me."

"Didn’t she know how sick to my stomach it made me feel to know it’s possible to end your life with only a baboon to talk to?"

"…somehow it was as if I was being told about something wonderful, something beautiful just waiting for me. All I had to do was wait long enough."

"He was the ugliest, most vicious-looking baboon I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean a real baboon. And there’s the pigman, the smiling pigman, leaning all the way over the guardrail, tossing peanuts to this mean baboon."

"When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it's not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end."

"It was beautiful, of course; I couldn't deny that. Everything was green: the trees, their trunks covered with moss, their branches hanging with a canopy of it, the ground covered with ferns. Even the air filtered down greenly through the leaves. It was too green — an alien planet."

"About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him — and I didn't know how potent that part might be — that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him."

"It's twilight," Edward murmured. [...] "It's the safest time of day for us," he said, answering the unspoken question in my eyes. "The easiest time. But also the saddest, in a way … the end of another day, the return of the night. Darkness is so predictable, don't you think?" He smiled wistfully. "I like the night. Without the dark, we'd never see the stars."

"Our relationship couldn’t continue to balance, as it did, on the point of a knife. We would fall off one edge or the other, depending entirely on his decision, or his instincts. My decision was made, made before I’d ever consciously chosen, and I was committed to seeing it through. Because there was nothing more terrifying to me, more excruciating, than the thought of turning away from him. It was an impossibility."

"And so the lion fell in love with the lamb..." he murmured. I looked away, hiding my eyes as I thrilled to the word. "What a stupid lamb," I sighed. "What a sick, masochistic lion."

"If I could dream at all, it would be about you. And I'm not ashamed of it."

"For almost ninety years I've walked among my kind, and yours … all the time thinking I was complete in myself, not realizing what I was seeking. And not finding anything, because you weren't alive yet."

""I love you," I whispered. "You are my life now," he answered simply."

"Twilight, again. Another ending. No matter how perfect the day is, it always has to end."

"Dazed and disoriented, I looked up from the bright red blood pulsing out of my arm — into the fevered eyes of the six suddenly ravenous vampires."

"You try very hard to make up for something that was never your fault. [...] You didn't choose this kind of life, and yet you have to work so hard to be good." "I don't know that I'm making up for anything," he disagreed lightly. "Like everything in life, I just had to decide what to do with what I was given."

"Tonight the sky was utterly black. Perhaps there was no moon tonight — a lunar eclipse, a new moon. A new moon. I shivered, though I wasn't cold."

"I felt the smooth wooden floor beneath my knees, and then the palms of my hands, and then it was pressed against the skin of my cheek. I hoped that I was fainting, but, to my disappointment, I didn't lose consciousness. The waves of pain that had only lapped at me before now reared high up and washed over my head, pulling me under. I did not resurface."

"Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me."

"I was like a lost moon — my planet destroyed in some cataclysmic, disaster-movie scenario of desolation — that continued, nevertheless, to circle in a tight little orbit around the empty space left behind, ignoring the laws of gravity."

"One thing I truly knew — knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest — was how love gave someone the power to break you. I had been broken beyond repair."

"Once you cared about a person, it was impossible to be logical about them anymore."

"I'd never seen anything more beautiful — even as I ran, gasping and screaming, I could appreciate that. And the last seven months meant nothing. And [Edward's] words in the forest meant nothing. And it did not matter if he did not want me. I would never want anything but him, no matter how long I lived."

"Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars — points of light and reason. ...And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn't see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything."

"I am a neutral country. I am Switzerland. I refuse to be affected by territorial disputes between mythical creatures."

"If there were any way for me to become human for you — no matter what the price was, I would pay it."

"I hate you, Jacob Black." "That's good. Hate is a passionate emotion." "I'll give you passionate," I muttered under my breath. "Murder, the ultimate crime of passion."

"Edward rode in the backseat of my father's police car, behind the fiberglass divider, with an amused expression — probably due to my father's amused expression, and the grin that widened every time Charlie stole a glance at Edward in his rearview mirror."

"They stood out from the rest of the crowd, their beauty and grace otherworldly. I wondered how I'd ever fallen for their human farce. A couple of angels, standing there with wings intact, would be less conspicuous."

"I wondered if I was a monster. Not the kind that [Edward] thought he was, but the real kind. The kind that hurt people. The kind that had no limits when it came to what they wanted."

"You know, Jacob, if it weren't for the fact that we're natural enemies and that you're also trying to steal away the reason for my existence, I might actually like you." "Maybe...if you weren't a disgusting vampire who was planning to suck out the life of the girl I love...well, no, not even then."

"[W]hen I left you, Bella, I left you bleeding. Jacob was the one to stitch you back up again. That was bound to leave its mark — on both of you. I'm not sure those kinds of stitches dissolve on their own."

"I'm exactly right for you, Bella. It would have been effortless for us — comfortable, easy as breathing. I was the natural path your life would have taken. [...] If the world was the way it was supposed to be, if there were no monsters and no magic..."

"He's like a drug for you, Bella." His voice was still gentle, not at all critical. "I see that you can't live without him now. It's too late. But I would have been healthier for you. Not a drug; I would have been the air, the sun." The corner of my mouth turned up in a wistful half-smile. "I used to think of you that way, you know. Like the sun. My personal sun. You balanced out the clouds nicely for me." He sighed. "The clouds I can handle. But I can't fight with an eclipse."

""Don't be afraid," I muttered. "We belong together." I was abruptly overwhelmed by the truth of my own words. This moment was so perfect, so right, there was no way to doubt it."

"Do you want me to sing to you? I'll sing all night if it will keep the bad dreams away."

"I told you—," I started to say. "Did you know that I told you so has a brother, Jacob?" she asked, cutting me off. "His name is Shut the hell up."

"They are vampires, I guess, Seth allowed after a minute, compensating for Leah's reaction. I mean, it makes sense. And if [drinking blood] helps Bella, it's a good thing, right? Both Leah and I stared at him. [...] Mom dropped him a lot when he was a baby, Leah told me. On his head, apparently."

"Have you heard this one, Psycho? How do a blonde's brain cells die? [... A] blonde's brain cells die alone."

"I could see that now — how the universe swirled around this one point. I'd never seen the symmetry of the universe before, but now it was plain. The gravity of the earth no longer tied me to the place where I stood. It was the baby girl in the blonde vampire's arms that held me here now. Renesmee."

"You stupid mutt! How could you? My baby! [Jacob] backed out the front door now as I stalked him, half-running backward down the stairs. "It wasn't my idea, Bella!" "I've held her all of one time, and already you think you have some moronic wolfy claim to her? She's mine. [...] How dare you imprint on my baby? Have you lost your mind?"

"I'll play you for it," Alice suggested. "Rock, paper, scissors." [...] "Why don't you just tell me who wins?" Edward said wryly. Alice beamed. "I do. Excellent."

"Who rules you, nomads? Do you answer to someone's will besides your own? Are you free to choose your own path, or will the Volturi decide how you will live? "I came to witness. I stay to fight. The Volturi care nothing for the death of a child. They seek the death of our free will."

"And then [Edward and I] continued blissfully into this small but perfect piece of our forever."

"It was a miracle — more than a miracle — when I found you, Melanie. Right now, if I was given the choice between having the world back and having you, I wouldn't be able to give you up. Not to save five billion lives."

"You never know how much time you'll have."

"This place was truly the highest and the lowest of all worlds — the most beautiful senses, the most exquisite emotions... the most malevolent desires, the darkest deeds. Perhaps it was meant to be so. Perhaps without the lows, the highs could not be reached."

"And it wasn't just ripping, but twisting and pulling in different directions. Because Melanie's heart broke, too, and it was a separate sensation, as if we'd grown another organ to compensate for our twin awarenesses. A double heart for a double mind. Twice the pain."

"I was all alone in my head — exactly what I had once wanted. It made me feel lost."

"I am female," I complained. "That 'it' business is really getting on my nerves." [...] "By whose definition?" "How about by yours? In my species, I am the one that bears young. Is that not female enough for you?"

"That's just great," someone said under his breath. "We've got a bloody queen mother alien living with us. She could blow into a million new buggers at any moment."

"You stupid jackass," Ian said. "Who's got the crush on a worm, bro? You gonna call me stupid?"

"It's not the face, but the expressions on it. It's not the voice, but what you say. It's not how you look in that body, but the things you do with it. You are beautiful.""

"What was it that made this human love so much more desirable to me than the love of my own kind? Was it because it was exclusive and capricious? The souls offered love and acceptance to all. Did I crave a greater challenge? This love was tricky; it had no hard-and-fast rules — it might be given for free, as with Jamie, or earned through time and hard work, as with Ian, or completely and heartbreakingly unattainable, as with Jared. Or was it simply better somehow? Because these humans could hate with so much fury, was the other end of the spectrum that they could love with more heart and zeal and fire?"

""You. Are. Not. Leaving. Me." His eyes blazed — burning brighter than I had ever seen them, blue flames."

"I held you in my hand, Wanderer. And you were so beautiful."

""It's a strange world," I murmured, more to myself than to the other native soul. "The strangest," he agreed."

"Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later--no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover or how much we learn or forget--we will return."

"A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept."

"Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind."

"There are worse prisons than words."

"Now I know I have already lost you. I have lost everything. Even so, I can't let you go forever and allow you to forget me without letting you know that I don't bear you any grudge, that I knew it from the start, I knew that I was going to lose you and that you would never see in me what I see in you. I want you to know that I loved you from the very first day and that I still love you, now more than ever, even if you don't want me to."

"Coincidences are the scars of fate."

"Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen."

"There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds."

"People die. That’s true in novels, and it’s true in life. Dying is one of the very few things we all do. To deny or ignore the omnipresent reality of death seems to me a disservice to human beings. That said, acknowledging in my novels that death exists does not make me a murderer any more than acknowledging that cancer can be treated makes me an oncologist."

"I may not have facts on my side, Hank, but I still think I'm right. That's the American way."

"Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself."

"Never go to war with a noun. You will always lose."

"I mean Hank, the movie was great, but the thirty minutes before the movie started was what I love about being a nerd. Because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. We don't have to be like, 'Oh yeah that purse is okay' or like, 'Yeah, I like that band's early stuff.' Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can't-control-yourself-love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they are saying is, 'You like stuff', which is just not a good insult at all, like 'You are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness'."

"Good morning Hank. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: 'My older brother really needs a haircut!' Well, Hank, I've got one thing to say to that. Never!"

"Now, Hank, obviously you and I are living proof that sometimes a nerd meets another nerd and they fall in nerd-love."

"The Venn Diagram of guys who don't like smart girls and guys you don't want to date is a circle."

"Is health care a privilege, or is it a right? If it's a privilege, even if it's a really desirable privilege like indoor plumbing, we need to stop giving health care of any kind to uninsured people who can't pay for it in advance. But... ...I think the reason we continue to treat people who are uninsured is because we don't believe that health care is a privilege. We believe that it is a right. And if it is a right, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the responsibility of a government to protect that right."

"The fourth way to get a boy to like you is to be yourself. Now, I am contractually obligated as an adult to give that advice, even though it doesn't work. But yeah, be yourself, even though no one has any idea what it means to be yourself. Like whose self would I otherwise be being?"

"'What's the meaning of life?' Other people."

"[Twilight] argues that true love will triumph in the end, which may or may not be true, but if it's a lie, it's the most beautiful lie we have."

"If you are rich, you have to be an idiot not to stay rich. And if you are poor, you have to be really smart to get rich."

"There is no them, there are only facets of us."

"Hank, before I move forward with this discussion, I should acknowledge that as a child I was an inveterate liar... As opposed to now, when I am a novelist."

"The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing it well or you're doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That is actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing."

"So I guess the first thing I would say is: you need to write a story that, unlike my story, has a beginning, a middle and an end. Also the beginning shouldn't involve hating foxes and the end shouldn't involve no one liking you."

"I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer. Because it's the only apprenticeship we have. It's the only way of learning how to write a story."

"When people have to choose between civilization and warm genitals, they choose warm genitals"

"It is very sad to me that some people are so intent on leaving their mark on the world that they don't care if that mark is a scar."

"The test will measure whether you are an informed, engaged and productive citizen of the world, and it will take place in schools and bars and hospitals and dorm-rooms and in places of worship. You will be tested on first dates, in job interviews, while watching football and while scrolling through your Twitter feed. The test will judge your ability to think about things other than celebrity marriages, whether you'll be easily persuaded by empty political rhetoric and whether you'll be able to place your life and your community in a broader context. The test will last your entire life, and it will be comprised of the millions of decisions that, when taken together, make your life yours. And everything - everything - will be on it."

"At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved."

"And we'll call you...hmmm. Pudge." "Huh?" "Pudge," the Colonel said. "Because you're skinny. It's called irony, Pudge. Heard of it? Now, let's go get some cigarettes and start this year off right."

"Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape—the world or the end of it?"

"You can say a lot of things about Alabama, but you can't say that Alabamans as a people are unduly afraid of deep fryers."

"Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die."

"The Colonel ran ahead of me, gleeful at his ejection, and I jogged after him, trailing in his wake. I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails."

"I may die young, but at least I'll die smart."

"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia." "Huh?" I asked. "You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."

"She has great breasts," the Colonel said without looking up from the whale. "DO NOT OBJECTIFY WOMEN'S BODIES!" Alaska shouted. Now he looked up. "Sorry. Perky breasts." "That's not any better!"

"God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will."

"I'm just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them."

"How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?"

"I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane."

"Prick us, we bleed. Prick him, he pops."

"Luck is for suckers."

"'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.'"

"[We] had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth."

"I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart."

"When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail."

"Thomas Edison's last words were, "It's very beautiful over there." I don't know where there is, but I know it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful."

"But mothers lie. It's in the job description."

"It hurt like the worst ass-kicking he'd ever gotten. And he'd gotten plenty."

"And then he lay there in his fever of sorry and repeated the now memorized note in his head and wanted to cry, but instead he only felt this aching behind his solar plexus. Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something."

"Missing her kept him awake more than the coffee."

"Colin believed that the world contained exactly two kinds of people: Dumpers and Dumpees. A lot of people will claim to be both, but those people miss the point entirely: You are predisposed to either one fate or the other. Dumpers may not always be the heartbreakers, and the Dumpees may not always be the heartbroken. But everyone has a tendency."

"He just wanted to play robot, for God's sake. Was that so wrong?"

"That smile could end wars and cure cancer."

"Colin did not laugh. Instead he thought, Tampons have strings? Why? Of all the major human mysteries—God, the nature of the universe, etc.—he knew the least about tampons. To Colin, tampons were a little bit like grizzly bears: he was aware of their existence, but he'd never seen one in the wild, and didn't really care to."

"He'd never been all that good at math, but he was a goddamned world-famous expert in getting dumped."

"People just liked Hassan, the way people like fast food and celebrities."

"The moment Colin sat down, Hollis asked Hassan, "Would you like to say grace?" "Sure thing." Hassan cleared his throat. "Bismillah." Then he picked up his fork. "That's it?" Hollis wondered. "That's it. We are a terse people. Terse, and also hungry.""

"It was, he thought, just like how authors always wrote things in ways other than how they actually happened."

"He wanted to draw out the moment before the moment—because as good as kissing feels, nothing feels as good as the anticipation of it."

"I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter."

"Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back."

"'Sup?" asked Hassan. "Sup is not a word," answered Colin without looking up. "You're like sunshine on a cloudy day, Singleton. When it's cold outside, you're the month of May."

"They'd just driven past the General Store when Hassan said, "We don't have to go to Hardee's really. We could go anywhere." "Oh good because I really don't want to go to Hardee's," Lindsey said. "It's sort of horrible. There's a Wendy's two exits down the interstate, in Milan. Wendy's is way better. They have, like, salads.""

"Colin's skin was alive with the feeling of connection to everyone in that car and everyone not in it. And he was feeling not-unique in the very best possible way."

"The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman."

"Maybe all the strings inside him broke."

"Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one."

""Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the hypothetical idea itself is actually used to cut diamonds," I added."

"That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste."

"It's a penis," Margo said, "in the same sense that Rhode Island is a state: it may have an illustrious history, but it sure isn't big."

"Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters."

"Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington's house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead."

"The fundamental mistake I had always made—and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make—was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl."

"You listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to."

"It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world."

"Lacey takes the bar from me and reluctantly bites into it. She has to close her eyes to hide the orgasmic pleasure inherent in GoFast-tasting. "Oh. My. God. That tastes like hope feels.""

"It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined."

"The thing about That Guy Is a Gigolo," Radar says, "I mean, the thing about it as a game, is that in the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined."

"What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person."

"[M]aybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we're grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications."

"It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in."

"I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I've never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero's errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I've ever done."

"When I was little, my dad used to tell me, "Will, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose.""

"Tiny Cooper is not the world's gayest person, and he is not the world's largest person, but I believe he may be the world's largest person who is really, really gay, and also the world's gayest person who is really, really large."

"Love is the most common miracle"

"Being in a relationship, that's something you choose. Being friends, that's just something you are."

"This is why we call people exes, I guess -- because the paths that cross in the middle end up separating at the end. It's too easy to see an X as a cross-out. It's not, because there's no way to cross out something like that. The X is a diagram of two paths."

"Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death."

"But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.)"

"Sometimes you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read that book."

"That's the thing about pain," Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. "It demands to be felt."

"As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep; Slowly, and then all at once."

"The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture."

"I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful."

"I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark almost blue color, and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.” A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.""

"“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?”""

"Hank: "If you just say enough things, some of them will end up on those quote websites." // John: "Which, of course, is the point of being a person.""

"I'm in love with cities I've never been to and people I've never met."

"(fills me with hope:) The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. I love the way John Green’s mind works. This book of essays traverses so many parts of our world—both elusive and quotidian—and demonstrates, ultimately, how remarkable it is to be human."

"Meanwhile," Simon added, "I wanted to tell you that lately I've been cross-dressing. Also, I'm sleeping with your mom. I thought you should know."

"What?" Simon looked alarmed. "I'm not really sleeping with your mom, you know. I was just trying to get your attention. Not that your mom isn't a very attractive woman, for her age."

"It's a girl," Jace said, recovering his composure. "Surely you've seen girls before, Alec. Your sister Isabelle is one."

"Hi, I'm one of the knife-carrying hooligans you met last night in Pandemonium? I'm afraid I made a bad impression and was hoping you'd give me a chance to make it up to- " "SIMON!" Clary held the phone away from her ear as he cracked up laughing. "That is so not funny!"

"Jesus!" Luke exclaimed. "Actually, it's just me," said Simon. "Although I've been told the resemblance is startling."

"I'll get the coffee if you find us a seat. What do you want?" "Just coffee. Black – like my soul."

"Do you want to tell me what this is about, or should I just call the police?" "And tell them what?" Jace said witheringly. "That invisible people are bothering you? Trust me, little girl, the police aren't going to arrest someone they can't see."

"Is there anything I could get for you?" he asked. "Something to drink? Some tea?" "I don't want tea," said Clary, with a muffled force. "I want to find my mother. And then I want to find out who took her in the first place, and I want to kill them." "Unfortunately," said Hodge, "we're all out of bitter revenge at the moment, so it's either tea or nothing."

"Just because you call an electric eel a rubber duck doesn't make it a rubber duck, does it? And God help the poor bastard who decides they want to take a bath with the duckie."

"You guessed? You must have been pretty sure, considering you could have killed me." "I was ninety percent sure." "I see," Clary said. There must have been something in her voice, because he turned to look at her. Her hand cracked across his face, a slap that rocked him back on his heels. He put his hand to his cheek, more in surprise than pain. "What the hell was that for?" "The other ten percent."

"I figured all your classes were stuff like Slaughter 101 and Beheading for Beginners."

"Well there goes my plan for selling them on eBay," Clary muttered. "Selling them on what?" Clary smiled blandly at him. "A mythical place of great magical power."

"If you were half as funny as you thought you were, my boy, you'd be twice as funny as you are."

"I've never asked, but I'm sure he has a fairly stringent policy about random teenagers lurking in his shrubbery."

"Yeah, well, you clearly also couldn't be bothered to call me and tell me you were shacking up with some dyed-blond wanna-be goth you probably met at Pandemonium. After I spent the past three days wondering if you were dead." "I was not shacking up," Clary said, glad of the darkness as the blood rushed to her face. "And my hair is naturally blond," said Jace. "Just for the record."

"He's probably never met a six-foot-tall hot elf-woman in a fur bikini, either,"

"I thought it'd be something cooler, like a van with 'Death to Demons' painted on the outside, or . . ."

"He cut his glance toward Jace, who was walking a few paces ahead of them, apparently conversing with the cat. Clary wondered what they were talking about. Politics? Opera? The high price of tuna?"

"Hodge sent me to wake you up. Actually, he offered to wake you up himself, but since it's five a.m., I figured you'd be less cranky if you had something nice to look at."

"Oh-Simon!" "No, I'm Jace," said Jace patiently. "Simon is the weaselly little one with the bad haircut and dismal fashion sense."

"I always thought cab drivers didn't pay attention to traffic, but this is ridiculous,"

"I suppose you don't have much time for enjoying music," Clary said, thinking of Simon, for whom music was his entire life, "in your line of work." He shrugged. "Maybe the occasional wailing chorus of the damned."

"If you wanted me to rip my clothes off, you should have asked."

"Don't order any of the faerie food," said Jace, looking at her over the top of his menu. "It tends to make humans a little crazy. One minute you're munching a faerie plum, the next minute you're running naked down Madison Avenue with antlers on your head. Not," he added hastily, "that this has ever happened to me."

"Good idea," said Jace. "I shall be Baron Hotschaft Von Hugenstein."

"I didn't," said Jace. "At least, I didn't finish it. It's Magnus Bane." He grinned at Alec mockingly. "Rhymes with 'overcareful pain in the ass.'"

"A diary with no drawings of me in it? Where are the torrid fantasies? The romance novel covers? The-"

"To love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be destroyed."

"Well, I'd certainly hate to interrupt your pleasant night stroll with my sudden death."

"If there was such a thing as terminal literalism, you'd have died in childhood,"

"Where's Simon?" Clary interrupted. Isabelle wobbled. "He's a rat," she said darkly. "Did he do something to you?" Alec was full of brotherly concern. "Did he touch you? If he tried anything-" "No, Alec," Isabelle said irritably. "Not like that. He's a rat"

"When the self-congratulatory part of the evening is over, maybe we could get back to saving my best friend from being exsanguinated to death?"

"Vials of holy water, blessed knives, steel and silver blades, electrum wire-- not much use at the moment, but it's always good to have a spare--silver bullets, charm of protection, crucifixes, stars of David-" "Jesus," said Clary. "I doubt he'd fit."

"There might be a God, Clary, and there might not, but I don't think it matters. Either way, we're on our own."

"This is bad," said Jace. "You said that before." "It seemed worth repeating."

"I thought you guys said only some of the vampire bikes could fly?" "Only some of them can!" "How did you know this was one of them?" "I didn't!"

"Do you remember back at the hotel when you promised that if we lived, you'd get dressed up in a nurse's outfit and give me a sponge bath?" "Actually, I think you misheard," Clary said. "It was Simon who promised you the sponge bath." Jace looked involuntarily over at Simon, who smiled at him widely. "As soon as I'm back on my feet, handsome." "I knew we should have left you a rat."

"Much like postal service, demon hunters never sleep. 'Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these-'" "You'd be in major trouble if gloom of night did stay you."

"A picnic? It's a little late for Central Park, don't you think? It's full of-" He waved a hand. "Faeries. I know." "I was going to say muggers," said Clary. "Though I pity the mugger who goes after you."

"She was afraid you'd freak out? Start seeing demons in the White House?"

"Well, when I was five, I wanted my mother to let me go around and around inside the dryer with the clothes," Clary said. "The difference is, she didn't let me." "Probably because going around and around inside a dryer can be fatal," Jace pointed out, "whereas pasta is rarely fatal. Unless Isabelle makes it."

"Maybe. Although I doubt most Shadowhunters get a tattoo of Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on their left shoulder."

"In future, Clarissa," he said, "it might be wise to mention that you already have a man in your bed, to avoid such tedious situations."

"Maybe you should have thought about that before you kissed me," he said. "I kissed you?" "Don't worry, it wasn't that memorable for me, either."

"You really want to know what else it was my mom said about you?" he asked. She shook her head. He didn't seem to notice. "She said you'd break my heart."

"Well you'll have to wait 'til tomorrow. I'm out of commission." He pointed at himself. "Look. Jammies."

"Don't tell me," he said. "You've got a drawing emergency. You need a nude model. Well, I'm not in the mood. You could ask Hodge."

"Jace was still staring at her as if she'd told him she'd found out one of the Silent Brothers doing nude cartwheels in the hallway."

"I can't wait 'til you draw something really complicated, like the Brooklyn Bridge or a lobster. You'll probably send me a singing telegram."

"Only Jace could look cool in pajama bottoms and an old T-shirt, but he pulled it off, probably through sheer force of will."

"You know, most psychologists agree that hostility is really just sublimated sexual attraction." "Ah, that might explain why I so often run into people who seem to dislike me."

"Sorry, are you telling me that your demon-slaying buddies need to be driven to their next assignation with the forces of darkness by my mom?"

"I forgot that's what gets you all hot and bothered, Jace. Girls killing things." "I like anyone killing things," He said equably, "Especially me."

"The nod means, 'I am a badass, and I recognize that you, too, are a badass.'"

"Demonic activity levels? Do they have a device that measures whether the demons inside the house are doing power yoga?"

"Seeing through glamour is easy. It's people that are hard."

"Unfortunately, Lady of the Haven, my one true love remains myself." "At least you don't have to worry about rejection, Jace Wayland." "Not necessarily. I turn myself down occasionally, just to keep it interesting."

"It's the Mortal Cup, Jace, not the Mortal Toilet Bowl."

"Drive fast, mundane. Drive like hell was following you."

"Wait a second." "I never understand why people say that," Luke said, to no one in particular. "I wasn't going anywhere."

"Well, you can go ahead and hang your head out of the car window if you feel like it." Luke laughed. "I'm a werewolf, not a golden retriever."

"That sounds terrific. Just you, your comatose wife, your shell-shocked son, and you daughter who hates your guts. Not to mention that your two kids may be in love with each other. Yeah, that sounds like a perfect family reunion."

"So she had a box. Lots of people have boxes. They keep things in them. It's a growing trend, I hear."

"Honestly Jace, don't you know better than to play with broken glass?"

"Was it weird hearing from Jace? I mean, since you found out . . ." "Yes? Since I found out what? That he's a killer transvestite who molests cats?" "No wonder that cat of his hates everyone."

"Do you think it was a coincidence?" "Do I think what was a coincidence?" "That we wound up in Pandemonium the same night that Jace and the others just happened to be there, pursuing a demon? The night before Valentine came for my mother?" Simon shook his head. "I don't believe in coincidences." "Neither do I." "But I have to admit, coincidence or not, it turned out to be a fortuitous occurrence."

"It's been so long that I think I was unsettled by the idea of feeling like I belonged anywhere. But you made me feel like I belong."

"I'll just have them change the entry in the demonology textbook from 'almost extinct' to 'not extinct enough for Alec. He prefers his monsters really, really extinct.' Will that make you happy?"

"I'm pure at heart. It repels the dirt."

"I don't see anything you need protecting from here," said the boy. "Except some bad decor and a possible mold problem. But you can usually clear that up with bleach."

"Then again, it was Jace. He'd pick a fight with a Mack truck if the urge took him."

"I don't want to be a man. I want to be an angst-ridden teenager who can't confront his own inner demons and takes it out verbally on other people instead."

"A werewolf. Like everyone else here. Except you, and the asshole. And the asshole's sister."

"Jace hadn't seemed perturbed, but knowing him, Simon had no doubt he could kill several people in a single morning and go out for waffles afterward."

"Maybe I should ask for blessings on my mission against all those who wear white after Labor Day."

"However, there is something you should have. Something every Shadowhunter should have." "An obnoxious, arrogant attitude?"

"This kind of reminds me of the time my grandfather gave me his old golf clubs." "Yeah, except you never use those." "And I hope you never have to use that."

"Looks like a bite mark. What have you been doing all day, anyway?" "Nothing. I went walking in the park. Tried to clear my head." "And ran into a vampire?" "What? No! I fell." "On your neck?"

"You see, cuckoos are parasites. They lay their eggs in other birds' nests. When the egg hatches, the baby cuckoo pushes the other baby birds out of the nest. The poor parent birds work themselves to death trying to find enough food to feed the enormous cuckoo child who has murdered their babies and taken their places." "Enormous? Did you just call me fat?" "It was an analogy." "I am not fat."

"I was trained to be an evil mastermind from a young age. Pulling the wings off flies, poisoning the earth's water supply - I was covering that stuff in kindergarten. I guess we're all just lucky my father faked his own death before he got to the raping and pillaging part of my education, or no one would be safe."

"I'm not sure anyone can make Jace do anything. But I think you can remind him that he has something to live for."

"It was like a bad movie, except he didn't actually twirl his mustache."

"Yeah, he's terrified I'll tell everyone that he's always really wanted to be a ballerina."

"Does he normally just lie on the floor like that without moving?"

"Nearly unlimited supernatural power, and all you do is use it to watch reruns. What a waste."

"We need to talk. All of us. About what we're going to do now." "I was going to watch Project Runway. It's on next."

"Magnus snapped his fingers again, menacingly. "Get up." "Or you'll be the next one to go up in smoke," said Simon with relish. "There's no need to clarify my finger snap. The implication was clear in the snap itself.""

"I love round tables. They suit me so much better than a square."

"Is standing by the window muttering about blood something he does all the time?" "No, sometimes he sits on the couch and does it."

"He's quoting Dungeons and Dragons. Ignore him."

"We seem to be trapped in an episode of One Life to Waste. It's all very dull."

"Sure. And Madonna wants me as a backup dancer on her next world tour."

""They can't be worse than vampires. And you did all right with them." "Did all right with them? By which I take it you mean we survived?" "Well. . ." "Faeries," Jace went on, as if Simon hadn't spoken, "are the offspring of demons and angels, with the beauty of angels and the viciousness of demons. A vampire might attack you, if you enter its domain, but a faerie could make you dance until you died with your legs ground into stumps, trick you into a midnight swim and drag you screaming underwater until your lungs burst, fill your eyes with faerie dust until you gouged them out at the roots-" "Jace!" Clary snapped."

"Never doubt my weaseling abilities, Shadowhunter, for they are epic and memorable in their scope."

"Isabelle with her whip and boots and knives would chop anyone who tried to pen her up in a tower into pieces, build a bridge out of the remains, and walk carelessly to freedom, her hair looking fabulous the entire time."

"Traded him for Alec," Clary said. "Not permanently." "No," said Jace. "Just for a few hours. Unless I don't come back. In which case, maybe he does get to keep Alec. Think of it as a lease with an option to buy." "Mom and Dad won't be pleased if they find out." "That you freed a possible criminal by trading away your brother to a warlock who looks like a gay Sonic the Hedgehog and dresses like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?" Simon inquired. "No, probably not."

"Every time I annoy him, he retreats into his No Mundanes Allowed tree house."

"That does it, I'm going to get you a dictionary for Christmas this year." "Why?" "So you can look up 'fun.' I'm not sure you know what it means."

"Faeries have no sense of humor." "Oh, I wouldn't say that. There's a pixie nightclub downtown called Hot Wings. Not that I have ever been there."

"Well, I'm not kissing the mundane. I'd rather stay down here and rot." "Forever? Forever's an awfully long time." "I knew it. You want to kiss me, don't you?"

"I guess it's true what they say. There are no straight men in the trenches." "That's atheists, jackass. There are no atheists in the trenches."

"It's not often you get to see someone drool. Especially with such total abandon. Mouth wide open and everything."

"Oh, for goodness' sake, is he really waking us up at this ungodly hour just to prove his love to you or something?"

"Look. In all the years I've known him, there's always been exactly one place Simon wanted to be, and he's always fought like hell to make sure he got there and stayed there." "Where's that?" "Wherever you were."

"It was hard not to laugh. Determination like that in a ten-year-old is something to see. He was like a pit bull." "If pit bulls wore glasses and were allergic to ragweed."

"How to Come Out to Your Parents," she read out loud. "LUKE. Don't be ridiculous. Simon's not gay, he's a vampire."

"I keep thinking about blood. I dream about it. Wake up thinking about it. Pretty soon I'll be writing morbid emo poetry about it."

"Because I foresee many romantic picnics in our future. You, drinking a virgin pina colada. Me, drinking the blood of a virgin."

"Here, I'll practice on you. Mom. I have something to tell you. I'm undead. Now, I know you may have some preconceived notions about the undead. I know you may not be comfortable with the idea of me being undead. But I'm here to tell you that the undead are just like you and me. Well, okay. Possibly more like me than you."

"What they had between them was still as fragile as a flickering candle flame, as delicate as eggshell - and he knew that if it shattered, if he somehow let it break and be destroyed, something inside him would shatter too, something that could never be fixed."

"If you're calling me up just to chat, mundane, you must be lonelier than I thought."

"With Jace, you don't really get to choose your insulting nickname."

""Nothing," chorused Clary, Simon, Alec, Magnus, and Jace, in a surprising and probably never-to-be-repeated unison."

"I wish I could hate you. I want to hate you. I try to hate you. It would be so much easier if I did hate you. Sometimes I think I do hate you and then I see you and I-" "And you what?" "What do you think? Why should I tell you everything about how I feel when you never tell me anything. It's like banging my head on a wall, except at least if I were banging my head on a wall, I'd be able to make myself stop."

"She was thinking of Simon, leaving for a house that no longer felt like home to him, of the despair in Jace's voice as he said I want to hate you, and of Magnus, not telling Jace the truth: that Alec did not want Jace to know about his relationship because he was still in love with him. She thought of the satisfaction it would have brought Magnus to say the words out loud, to acknowledge what the truth was, and the fact that he hadn't said them-had let Alec go on lying and pretending-because that was what Alec wanted, and Magnus cared about Alec enough to give him that. Maybe it was true what the Seelie Queen had said, after all: Love made you a liar."

"You might want to lie down. I find that helps when the crushing sense of horrible realization sets in."

"No offense to anyone involved, but the only one among you who seems formidable is Jace. An untrained Shadowhunter and a scared vampire. . ."

"There might simply be nothing going on that might activate it. Perhaps there isn't anything here that Alec is afraid of." Magnus glanced at Alec and raised his eyebrows. "Boo."

"What about the dark? We could lock you in the basement." "I'm a demon hunter. Clearly, I am not afraid of the dark."

"Admiring yourself? You won't look so pretty when the Clave gets through with you." "You do seem obsessed with my looks. Could it be that all this is because you're attracted to me?"

"He waited, but nothing happened. "Boom? Was something suppose to happen there?""

"You don't know my father. He'll laugh in your face and offer you some money to mail my body back to Idris." "Don't be absurd-" "You're right. Coming to think of it, he'll probably make you pay for the shipping charges yourself."

"No, I'm just a very naughty boy. I do all sorts of bad things. I kick kittens. I make rude gestures at nuns."

"What? I thought you came down right on the side of go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. 'The Law is the Law, Isabelle.' What was all that you were spouting?"

"I thought I'd lie on the floor and writhe in pain for awhile. It relaxes me."

"Hearing my achievements recited is certainly gratifying, but I'm not sure what your point is, Alec."

"What makes you think that Valentine's change of plans had anything to do with your brother?" "Because only Jace can piss someone off that much."

"If you're texting Magnus to say 'I think u r kewl,' I'm going to kill you."

"If I made a joke about just dropping in, would you write me off as a cliche?"

"Any last words?" Simon knew what he was supposed to say. Sh'ma Yisrael, adonai elohanu, adonai echod. Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. He tried to speak the words, but a searing pain burned his throat. "Clary,"

""You disappear so completely into your head sometimes. I wish I could follow you." You do. You live in my head all the time."

"What did he promise you?" "Oh, you know. The usual. A lifetime's supply of Knicks tickets."

"We have to get out of here." "No offense, but that's pretty obvious."

"The greatest fear in Jonathan's life is the love he feels for his sister."

"When did you get that?" "The shirt? At Macy's. Winter sale."

""I know you don't have to help us out-it's a favor-" "Stop. I don't do favors, Alec. I do things for you because-- well, why do you think I do them?"

"This is so weird. I keep expecting the truck to start sinking." "I can't believe you just went through what we went through and you think this is weird."

"No. I've always known just who you are. Ever since the first time I saw you getting off the ship from Idris, when you were ten years old-you walked into my heart, just as my own children did when they were born."

"Forgive my parental panic. I tend to get a little nervous when you're not in my immediate line of sight these days." "Oh yeah? How long do you think that's going on for?" "Not long. Five, maybe six years." "Luke!" "I plan to let you start dating when you're thirty, if that helps."

"I really was sick. I swear. I almost died back there on the ship, you know." "I know. Every time you almost die, I almost die myself."

"Or maybe she's trying to take the attention off you," Simon said, almost absently. "You know since your parents don't know you're gay and all." Alec stopped in the middle of the road so suddenly that Simon almost crashed into him. "No," he said, "but apparently everyone else does."

"I know how you think you feel about me, you don't though. You just like me because I'm safe. There's no risk. And then you never have to try to have a real relationship because you can use me as an excuse."

"Love makes us liars. The Seelie Queen told me that. So don't judge me for lying about how I feel. You do it too."

"There is no pretending, I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there is life after that, I'll love you then."

"I think it's strawberry juice," Isabelle said. "Anyway, it's yummy. Jace?" She offered him the glass. "I am a man," he told her, "and men do not consume pink beverages. Get thee gone, woman, and bring me something brown." "Brown?" Isabelle made a face. "Brown is a manly color."

"Well, when a mommy vampire and a daddy vampire love each other very much..."

"I'm taking that away from you before you get to the India part, Magnus in a sari. Some things you don't ever forget."

""Stay with me. We can see the whole world." "I am with you. I'm not going anywhere." "Is there anything special you want to see? Paris? Budapest? The Leaning Tower of Pisa?" Only if it falls on Sebastian's head, she thought."

"Well, what kind of thing does make you feel calm and peaceful?" "Killing demons. A good clean kill is very relaxing. The messy ones are more annoying, because you have to clean up afterward--" "No. No killing. We're trying to make you feel peaceful. Blood, killing, war, those are all non-peaceful things. Isn't there anything else you like?" "Weapons. I like weapons." "I'm starting to think we have a problematic issue of personal philosophy here."

"I'm a warrior. I was brought up as a warrior. I didn't have toys, I had weapons. I slept with a wooden sword until I was five. My first books were medieval demonologies with illuminated pages. The first songs I learned were chants to banish demons. I know what brings me peace, and it isn't sandy beaches or chirping birds in rain forests. I want a weapon in my hand and a strategy to win." "So you're saying what brings you peace is war." "Now you get it."

"You're pining." "Look who's talking. 'Oh, I love her. Oh, she's my sister. Oh why, why, why--'"

"What does she want?" "Constant meetings. Depositions. The Clave keeps wanting to hear what happened when we fought Sebastian at the Burren. We've all had to give accounts, like, fifty times. How Jace absorbed the heavenly fire from Glorious. Descriptions of the Dark Shadowhunters, the Infernal Cup, the weapons they used, the runes that were on them. What we were wearing, what Sebastian was wearing, what everyone was wearing... like phone sex but boring."

"I have to buy Hanukkah presents. It's mandated by Jewish law. The God of the Jews is an angry God. And very gift-oriented."

"I know Shadowhunters. I have for a long time. You are odd creatures. All fragile nobility and humanity on one side, and all the thoughtless fire of angels on the other. You especially, Herondale, for you have the fire of angels in your blood."

"Defining relationships over here? I see that even as the world plunges into darkness and peril, you two stand around discussing your love lives. Teenagers."

"Heroes aren't always the ones who win. They're the ones who lose, sometimes. But they keep fighting, they keep coming back. They don't give up. That's what makes them heroes."

"But the Silent Brothers have tried everything to separate Jace from the heavenly fire, and they can't do it. It's in his soul. So what's their plan, hitting Sebastian over the head with Jace until he passes out?" "Brother Zachariah said pretty much the same thing. Maybe with less sarcasm."

"We work through this together, remember? No shutting me out. No epic sulks." "I was figuring I could sulk for Idris in the next Olympics." "You and Alec could go for pair sulking. You'd get the gold."

"Whatever it is, don't do it! It's a bad idea." "And why would you say that?" "Because they're the only kind you have. I have known you a long time, and I am absolutely certain on the subject. If you are planning to become a pirate again, it's a bad idea." "I don't repeat my mistakes." "You're right. you make all new and even worse mistakes. Don't do it, whatever it is. Don't lead a werewolf uprising, don't do anything that might accidentally contribute to the apocalypse, and don't start your own line of glitter and try to sell it at Sephora." "That last idea has real merit."

"You said not to do anything that might accidentally contribute to the apocalypse. I know you were joking. But it's less funny when I can't rid myself of the feeling that the apocalypse is coming, somehow. Valentine Morgenstern nearly wiped out the Shadowhunters, and his son is twice as clever and six times as evil."

"If you flinch from it, you give it power over you. Take it, and cut your brother's throat with it, and take back the honor of your blood."

"He said the Brothers owed the Herondales because of old ties. If he dies, it will be--" "--No one's fault. I remember when he put the protection spell on you. I told him I never wanted you to have anything to do with the Shadowhunters. He said it might not be my choice. He said that the pull of the Shadowhunters is like a riptide-- and he was right. I thought we had fought free, but here we are, back in Alicante, back in a war, and there sits my daughter with blood on her face and a Morgenstern blade in her hands."

"Everyone should die with someone holding onto them."

"Clary looked down at herself. She was wearing a pair of flannel pajamas, too short in the leg and tight in the chest, with fire trucks on them. Luke raised an eyebrow. 'I think those were mine when I was a kid.' 'You can't seriously tell me there wasn't anything else you could have put me in.' 'If you insist on trying to get yourself killed, I insist on being the one who chooses what you wear while you recover,' Jocelyn said with a tiny smirk. 'The pajamas of vengeance,' Clary muttered."

"I want to see Brother Zachariah." "He is well. You need not worry yourself about him." "I want to see him. I nearly killed him at the Citadel--" "That was not you. That was the heavenly fire. And it did anything but harm him." "He said when I met him that he believes a debt is owed to the Herondales. I'm a Herondale. He'd want to see me." "And then you intend to depart the Basilias?" "There is nothing wrong with me. I don't need to be in the infirmary. Surely you could be using your resources more fruitfully on the actually wounded. Look, you can either bring me to Brother Zachariah or I can wander around yelling for him until he turns up." "You are a great deal of trouble, Jace Herondale." "So I've been told."

"Jace Herondale. Once more a Herondale is the bringer of my deliverance. I should have anticipated."

"Herondales. I had almost forgotten. No other family does so much for love, or feels so much guilt for it. Don't carry the weight of the world on you, Jace. It's too heavy for even a Herondale to bear."

"Weapons, when they break and are mended, can be stronger at the mended places. Perhaps hearts are the same."

"Above her another window opened, and Alec leaned out. 'What's going on?' His gaze landed on Clary and the others, his eyebrows drawing together in confusion. 'What is this? Early caroling?' 'I don't carol,' said Simon. 'I'm Jewish. I only know the dreidel song.'"

"I'm sorry. It's just-- you know me. I only have two reactions to bad news. Uncontrollable rage and then a sharp left turn into boiling self-hatred."

"'There,' he said, pointing to the leafy tunnel. 'That goes farther into Faerie. And that'--he pointed ahead--'is the road to Hell. That's where we're going.' 'I always heard it was paved with good intentions,' said Simon. 'Place your feet upon the way and find out, Daylighter,' said the Queen."

"You don't all have to look so worried. I was doing fine." "Fine? If your definition of 'fine' suddenly includes becoming a snack for a flying death turtle, then we are going to have words, Jace Lightwood--"

"'Help? Of course we can help,' Malcolm said, turning around to face them. 'You need to get a message through? There's always carrier kittens.' 'You mean pigeons,' said Bat. 'Carrier pigeons.' Malcolm shook his head. 'Carrier kittens. They're so cute, no one can deny them. Fix your mouse problem, too.'"

"'We don't have a mouse problem,' said Maia. 'We have a megalomaniac problem.' She looked at Catarina. 'Sebastian's determined to drive wedges between Downworlders and Shadowhunters. Kidnapping the representatives, attacking the Praetor, he won't stop there. All of Downworld will know soon enough what's going on. The question is, where will they stand?' 'We will stand bravely with you!' Malcolm announced. Catarina looked darkly at him, and he quailed. 'Well, we will stand bravely near you. Or at least within earshot.'"

"Warlocks are independent. And hard to get hold of. Like cats, but with fewer tails. Well, there are some tails. I don't have one myself--"

"I want to be mad at you." "Oh? What for?" "Risking your life. Except you didn't, really. You were just standing there and the demon grabbed you. Admittedly, you were being obnoxious to Simon." "If a demon grabbed me every time I was obnoxious to Simon, I'd have died the day you met me."

"I just... I don't know how I got here." "I could probably retrace our steps. Straight through the faerie corridor, left at the decimated village, right at the blasted plain of the damned, sharp U-turn at the heap of dead demon--"

"Shadowhunters. They get in your blood, under your skin. I've been with vampires, werewolves, faeries, warlocks like me-- and humans, so many fragile humans. But I always told myself I wouldn't give my heart to a Shadowhunter. I've so nearly loved them, been charmed by them-- generations of them, sometimes: Edmund and Will and James and Lucie... the ones I saved and the ones I couldn't. And Clary, too, I loved, for I watched her grow up. But I've never been in love with a Shadowhunter, not until Alec. For they have the blood of angels in them, and the love of angels is a high and holy thing."

"Sometimes it comes down to a choice. Between saving one person and saving the whole world. I've seen it happen, and I'm selfish enough to want the person who loves me to choose me. But Nephilim will always choose the world. I look at Alec and I feel like Lucifer in Paradise Lost. "Abashed the Devil stood, And felt how awful goodness is." He meant it in the classic sense. 'Awful' as in inspiring awe. And awe is well and good, but it's poison to love. Love has to be between equals."

"'I did not make a pie,' Alec repeated, gesturing expressively with one hand, 'for three reasons. One, because I do not have any pie ingredients. Two, because I don't actually know how to make a pie.' He paused, clearly waiting. Removing his sword and and leaning it against the cave wall, Jace said warily, 'And three?' 'Because I am not your bitch,' Alec said, clearly pleased with himself."

"I always thought being a Shadowhunter meant that I had to approve of what the Clave did. I thought otherwise I wasn't loyal. I made excuses for them. I always have. But I feel like whenever we have to fight, we're fighting a war on two fronts. We fight the enemy and we fight the Clave, too. I don't--I just don't know how I feel anymore."

"The first time you saw me, I bet you didn't think, He's going to get me killed." "The first time I saw you, I wished you'd go back to Idris. You know I don't like change." "I grew on you, though." "Eventually. Like a moss, or a skin disease."

"'Sure, he likes you,' said Alec. 'You're heterosexual and have low expectations of father figures.' 'I think they'll probably put that on my gravestone. "He Was Heterosexual and Had Low Expectations."'"

"'Who's there?' he called, then frowned. 'Of course,' he added, addressing the darkness all around, 'even I, as a Shadowhunter, have seen enough movies to know that anyone who yells 'Who's there?' is going to be instantly killed.'"

"Jace shook his head. 'I don't care if I did just set myself on fire,' he said. 'I'm not hugging you.' Simon sighed and dropped his arms. 'Your loss,' he said. 'If you'd gone in, I would've let you, but honestly it would have been a pity hug.'"

"'How do you people stand snow?' he demanded. "'You people'?" Bat bristled. 'Do you mean werewolves?' 'I mean East Coasters,' said Malcolm. 'Who would have weather if they could avoid it? Snow, hail, rain. I'd move to Los Angeles in a jiffy. Did you know that a jiffy is an actual measurement of time? It's a sixtieth of a second. You can't do anything in a jiffy, not really.'"

"'You know,' Maia said. 'Catarina said you were pretty harmless--' Malcolm looked pleased. 'Catarina said I was pretty?'"

"Why are you filming this?" "When the cat is away, the mice will play... Always good to remind the mice that in this case, when the cat is away, the mice will all be eaten by demons. I'm going to send this video file to everyone one of our Downworlder contacts around the world. Just a reminder that there are demons we need Shadowhunters to destroy. That's why they exist."

"Why didn't you say something?" "Because, it's not like there's animals I can feed on here." "There's us." "I don't want to feed on my friends' blood." "Why not? We've been here before, haven't we? Last time you were starving, I gave you my blood. It was a little homoerotic, maybe, but I'm secure in my sexuality."

"Straight people. Why can't they control themselves?"

"Maybe you should try looking a little less smug about what you did last night." "I do not look smug. Well, no more than usual." "Please, I can read your face like a very open, very pornographic book. I wish I couldn't."

"Is our strategy when we actually see him still 'trust me,' by the way?" "It's still 'trust me.'" "Oh, good. For a second there I was worried there was going to be an actual plan with, like, steps we could follow. You know, something reassuring."

"Are we long-lost friends, by chance?" "No, we never got along all that well. Long-lost acquaintances? Compadres? My cat liked you."

"Brother Zachariah. Months January through December of the Hot Silent Brothers Calendar."

"I remember you said this war was a story of Lightwoods and Herondales and Fairchilds, and it is, and Blackthorns and Carstairs as well, and it's amazing to see them. But when I do, it's as if I see the past that stretches out behind them. I watch Jace Herondale play, and I see the ghosts that rise up in the music. Don't you?"

"I feel a kinship with you, too, you who have lost both brother and father. I know you have been judged and spoken of as the daughter of Valentine Morgenstern, and now the sister of Jonathan. There will always be those who want to tell you who you are based on your name or the blood in your veins. Do not let people decide who you are. Decide for yourself. That freedom is not a gift; it is a birthright. I hope that you and Jace will use it."

"Has anyone seen Church? I think Zachariah just stole our cat. I swear I saw him putting Church in the backseat of a car."

"Simon was looking at Jace as if he were both fascinating and also a little alarming. 'Did I-- did we ever-- did I bite you?' Jace touched the scar on his throat. 'I can't believe you remember that.' 'Did we... roll around on the bottom of a boat?' 'Yes, you bit me, yes, I kind of liked it, yes, let's not talk about it again,' said Jace."

"One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us."

"Inanimate objects are harmless indeed, Mr. Mortmain. But one cannot always say the same of the men who use them."

"I recall what you said to me once, that words have the power to change us. Your words have changed me, Tess; they have made me a better man than I would have been otherwise. Life is a book, and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read. I would read them together with you, as many as I can, before I die."

"When two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or bronze."

"'No glamour?' Magnus inquired. 'You said that you wanted me to join you on travels that would be a ceaseless round of debauchery,' Ragnor told him. Magnus beamed. 'I did!' He paused. 'Forgive me. I do not see the connection.' 'I have found I have better luck with the ladies in my natural state,' Ragnor told him. 'Ladies enjoy a bit of variety. There was a woman in the court of Louis the Sun King who said none could compare to her "dear little cabbage." I hear it's become quite a popular term of endearment in France. All thanks to me.'"

"Don't worry. I can teach you every word that you need to know right now. One of them is fiesta. "What does that mean?" "It means 'party' Another important word is juerga. "What does that word mean? [...] Magnus, does that word also mean 'party?'" "I would apologize, except that I feel no regret at all."

"Try to be a little sensible." "We're on holiday!" "You're always on holiday. You've been on holiday for thirty years!" "I can't get enough adventure. And adventure can't get enough of me."

"He paused and admired the bromeliads, huge iridescent flower-like bowls made out of petals, shimmering with color and water. There were frogs inside the jewel-bright recesses of the flowers. Then he looked up into the round brown eyes of a monkey. 'Hello, companion,' said Magnus. The monkey made a terrible sound, half snarl and half hiss. 'I begin to rather doubt the beauty of our friendship,' said Magnus."

"But of course you should have retreated at once from the dominant male. Are you an idiot? You are extremely lucky he was distracted from ripping out your throat by the fruit. He thought you were trying to steal his females." "Pardon me, but we did not have the time to exchange that kind of personal information. I could not have known! Moreover, I wish to assure both of you that I did not make any amorous advances on female monkeys. [...] I didn't actually see any, so I didn't get the chance."

"You could not tell a potential customer, expecting a learned and ancient magician, that you were not eve fully grown. Magnus had started lying about his age young, and had never dropped the habit. It did get a little embarrassing sometimes when he forgot what lie he'd told to whom. Someone had once asked him what Julius Caeser was like, and Magnus had stared at him for much too long and said, 'Not tall?'"

"It is something to remember, if we feel distant from humans. We owe a great deal to human love. We live forever by the grace of human love, which rocked strange children in their cradles and did not despair and did not turn away. I know which side of my heritage my soul comes from. Our fathers were demons. Our mothers were heroes."

"Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear."

"It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers."

"Are you there God? It's Me, Margaret...."

"We must — we must — we must increase our bust!"

"But if you aren't any religion, how are you going to know if you should join the Y or the Jewish Community Center?"

"My parents raised me, of course, but it was a different adult who shaped my mental landscape. My imagination, my capacity for empathy, my sense of curiosity and my awareness that, while I was unique, I wasn't alone: others felt the same fears and feelings as me. On top of all that, this woman taught me about menstruation, masturbation, making out and sex, which is a damned sight more than any teacher ever did. I was not the only one she took under her wing: there are millions and millions of us who were shaped by her – whole generations who grew up under her tutelage – because this woman is Judy Blume."

"I wrote 87 Goosebumps books. That's a lot of books for a human, isn't it? None of us expected what happened with Goosebumps. We started it in 1992, and by 1994, I was turning out a Goosebumps a month, and it was doing okay for a while. And then it just took off like nothing we'd ever seen. It took off all over the world – not through advertising, hype, or promotions – but just kids telling kids. There's some kind of secret kids network out there. Just kids telling kids about it, and this thing grew everywhere. It was in 28 languages. At one point, after a couple years, we were selling 4 million Goosebumps books a month."

"Yes, I was a funny guy for a long time. When I started out, I just wanted to write humor. I wrote humor for kids. My very first book was called How to be Funny. It was about how to get big laughs at the dinner table and how to get laughs in school. Parents hated this book. I wrote joke books, like A Hundred and One Monster Jokes, and other joke books for years. I did maybe a hundred of them. I had a great time, and I did this humor magazine called Bananas for ten years. It was sort of Mad Magazine, but it was all in color, and it was great. That was all I ever wanted to do. I couldn't believe it. When that ended, I figured I would just coast for the rest of my career. That was it. I'd already done what I wanted to do. I had no idea what was coming up."

"The Hunger Games is a reality television program. An extreme one, but that's what it is. And while I think some of those shows can succeed on different levels, there's also the voyeuristic thrill, watching people being humiliated or brought to tears or suffering physically. And that's what I find very disturbing. There's this potential for desensitizing the audience so that when they see real tragedy playing out on the news, it doesn't have the impact it should. It all just blurs into one program. And I think it's very important not just for young people, but for adults to make sure they're making the distinction. Because the young soldier's dying in the war in Iraq, it's not going to end at the commercial break. It's not something fabricated, it's not a game. It's your life."

"“In our world, I rank music somewhere between hair ribbons and rainbows in terms of usefulness.”"

"BEWARE UNDERLANDERS, TIME HANGS BY A THREAD, THE HUNTERS ARE HUNTED, WHITE WATER RUNS RED. THE GNAWERS WILL STRIKE TO EXTINGUISH THE REST. THE HOPE OF THE HOPELESS RESIDES IN A QUEST."

"Luxa and I do not serve food, we are royalty." "Yeah, well, I'm the warrior and Boots is a princess. And you two are going to get pretty hungry if you're waiting for me to serve you." "Tell him, boy. Tell him your country fought a war so you wouldn't have to answer to kings and queens."

"You know, where I come from, we don't think much of someone who sneaks up and stabs a person in their sleep."

"I thought I detected in you a sense of fair play. Most dangerous in the Underland, boy."

"So, what brings the Children's Crusade into the Firelands? I don't flatter myself you were looking for me." "We got lost on a picnic."

"If you think back, my comments were very open to interpretation. And you happen to be easily misled. As for the queen, who is difficult to lead anywhere... I have always been and intend to be entirely straightforward."

"Gregor turned on the television and flipped through the channels. He stopped at the news. A bomb had blown up in a marketplace somewhere, killing forty-nine. There were body parts and smoke and relatives wailing. The next story was about refugees dying on the road, driven from their homes by an enemy army. The news anchor was just starting to show a grainy video of a soldier who had been taken hostage when his mother reached in and switched off the television. She looked so sad. "I think you've seen enough, Gregor." It had all looked pretty familiar. The bodies, the fear, the desperation. These things had always been here in the Overland, he supposed, but he had never really paid any attention to them until now."

"Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. The Hunger Games have begun."

"She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping."

"So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts."

"And may the odds—" He tosses a berry in a high arc toward me. I catch it in my mouth and break the delicate skin with my teeth. The sweet tartness explodes across my tongue. "—be ever in your favor!"

"Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don’t think of District 12 as a place that cares about me. But a shift has occurred since I stepped up to take Prim's place, and now it seems I have become someone precious. At first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out to me. It is an old and rarely used gesture of our district, occasionally seen at funerals. It means thanks, it means admiration, it means good-bye to someone you love."

""So you're supposed to give us some advice", I say to Haymitch. "Here's some advice. Stay Alive," says Haymitch and bursts out laughing."

""I want the audience to recognize you when you're in the arena," says Cinna dreamily. "Katniss, the girl who was on fire." It crosses my mind that Cinna's calm and normal demeanor masks a complete madman."

"You don't forget the face of the person who was your last hope."

"So, here's what you do. You win, you go home. She can‘t turn you down then, eh?" says Caesar encouragingly. "I don't think it‘s going to work out. Winning...won‘t help in my case," says Peeta. "Why ever not?" says Caesar, mystified. Peeta blushes beet red and stammers out. "Because...because...she came here with me."

""Only I keep wishing I could think of a way to...to show the Capitol they don't own me. That I'm more than just a piece in their Games," says Peeta."

"Ladies and gentlemen, let the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games begin!"

"I wonder what Gale made of the incident for a moment and then I push the whole thing out of my mind becouse for some reason Gale and Peeta do not coexist well together in my thoughts."

"I enter a nightmare from which I wake repeatedly only to find a greater terror awaiting me. All the things I dread most, all the things I dread for others manifest in such vivid detail I can’t help but believe they're real. Each time I wake, I think, At last, this is over, but it isn't. It's only the beginning of a new chapter of torture. How many ways do I watch Prim die? Relive my father's last moments? Feel my own body ripped apart? This is the nature of the tracker jacker venom, so carefully created to target the place where fear lives in your brain."

""Come on," says Cato. He thrusts a spear into the hands of the boy from District 3, and they head off in the direction of the fire. The last thing I hear as they enter the woods is Cato saying, "When we find her, I kill her in my own way, and no one interferes." Somehow I don't think he's talking about Rue. She didn't drop a nest of tracker jackers on him."

"Deep in the meadow, hidden far away A cloak of leaves, a moonbeam ray Forget your woes and let your troubles lay And when again it's morning, they'll wash away. Here it's safe, here it's warm Here the daisies guard you from every harm The final lines are barely audible. Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true Here is the place where I love you."

"Remember, we're madly in love, so it‘s all right to kiss me anytime you feel like it."

"And while I was talking, the idea of actually losing Peeta hit me again and I realized how much I don't want him to die. And it's not about the sponsors. And it's not about what will happen back home. And it's not just that I don't want to be alone. It's him. I do not want to lose the boy with the bread."

"Then for the next eleven years, I tried to work up the nerve to talk to you.". "Without success," I add. "Without success."

""You're not leaving me here alone," I say. Because if he dies, I'll never go home, not really. I'll spend the rest of my life in this arena trying to think my way out."

"It's like being home again, when they bring in the hopelessly mangled person from the mine explosion, or the woman in her third day of labor, or the famished child struggling against pneumonia and my mother and Prim, they wear that same look on their faces. Now is the times to run away tho the woods, to hide in the trees until the patient is long gone and in another part of the Seam the hammers make the coffin. But I'm held here both by the hovercraft walls and the same force that holds the loved ones of the dying. How often I've seen them, ringed around our kitchen table and I thought, Why don't they leave? Why do they stay to watch? And now I know. It's because you have no choice."

""One more time? For the audience?" he says. His voice wasn't angry. It's hollow, which is worse. Already the boy with the bread is slipping away from me. I take his hand, holding on tightly, preparing for the cameras, and dreading the moment when I finally have to let go."

"Hendrix has read the interviews where Collins has flatly denied knowing about Battle Royale before she wrote The Hunger Games. But Hendrix says the plots are eerily similar: school kids chosen by lottery, given a variety of weapons and survival packs and taken to a remote, restricted area to take part in a televised death match."

"Just like Battle Royale, it's supposed to communicate war's horrors to young teenagers."

"Hendrix says one of the most important things Battle Royale and The Hunger Games share is the idea of teenagers trapped in a ruined society, coerced by grownups into doing horrible things."

"I read The Hunger Games and didn't feel an urge to go on. It's not unlike [my novel] The Running Man, which is about a game where people are actually killed and people are watching: a satire on reality TV."

"You've got to go through it to get to the end of it."

"A shiver goes through me when I think of the proximity of my mother and sister to this man who despises me. Will always despise me. Because I outsmarted his sadistic Hunger Games, made the Capitol look foolish, and consequently undermined his control. All I was doing was trying to keep myself and Peeta alive. Any act of rebellion was purely coincidental. But when the Capitol decrees that only one tribute can live and you have the audacity to challenge it, I guess that’s a rebellion in itself."

"I think we'll make this whole situation a lot simpler by agreeing not to lie to each other," he says. "What do you think?" I think my tongue has frozen and speech will be impossible, so I surprise myself by answering back in a steady voice, "Yes, I think that would save time."

"Whatever problems anyone may have with the Capitol, believe me when I say that if it released its grip on the districts for even a short time, the entire system would collapse." [...] "It must be very fragile, if a handful of berries can bring it down."

"Katniss Everdeen, the girl who was on fire, you have provided a spark that, left unattended, may grow to an inferno that destroys Panem."

"Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them. Like me, for instance. Right now."

"No wonder I won the games. No decent person ever does."

"Life in District 12 isn’t really so different from life in the arena. At some point, you have to stop running and turn around and face whoever wants you dead. The hard thing is finding the courage to do it."

"Let them go, I tell myself. Say good-bye and forget them. I do my best, thinking of them one by one, releasing them like birds from the protective cages inside me, locking the doors against their return."

"“When you’re on the chariot this time, no waving, no smiling. I just want you to look straight ahead, as if the entire audience is beneath your notice.” “Finally something I’ll be good at,” I say."

"Suddenly I remember how she volunteered to replace the young, hysterical woman in her district. It couldn't be because she thought she had any chance of winning. She did it to save the girl, just like I volunteered last year to save Prim. And I decide I want her on my team."

""I guess this is a bad time to mention I hung a dummy and painted Seneca Crane's name on it," I say."

"I wish I could freeze this moment, right here, right now, and live in it forever."

"I squint down at my feet and see that my metal plate is surrounded by blue waves that lap up over my boots. Slowly I raise my eyes and take in the water spreading out in every direction. I can only form one clear thought. This is no place for a girl on fire."

"What's going on down there, Katniss? Have they all joined hands? Taken a vow of nonviolence? Tossed the weapons in the sea in defiance of the Capitol?" Finnick asks. "No," I say. "No," Finnick repeats. "Because whatever happened in the past is in the past. And no one in this arena was a victor by chance." He eyes Peeta for a moment. "Except maybe Peeta."

"Poor Finnick. Is this the first time in your life you haven't looked pretty?" I say. "It must be. The sensation's completely new. How have you managed it all these years?"

"Oh," I say under my breath. "Tick, tock." My eyes sweep around the full circle of the arena and I know she's right. "Tick, tock. This is a clock."

"It's better than hunting them down in the jungle, anyway. And I doubt they'll figure out our plan, since we can barely understand it ourselves."

"He looks at my hand. “So it’s you and a syringe against the Capitol? See, this is why no one lets you make the plans.”"

"They can pump whatever they want into my arm, but it takes more than that to keep a person going once she's lost the will to live."

"Katniss," Gale says softly. I recognize that voice. It's the same one he uses to approach wounded animals before he delivers a deathblow. I instinctively raise my hand to block his words but he catches it and holds on tightly. "Don't," I whisper. But Gale is not one to keep secrets from me. "Katniss, there is no District Twelve."

"My Name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. My home is District 12. I was in The Hunger Games. I escaped. The Capitol hates me. Peeta was taken prisoner. He is thought to be dead. Most likely he is dead. It is probably best if he is dead..."

"“Katniss, she’s running this district. She can’t do it if it seems like she’s caving in to your will.” “You mean she can’t stand any dissent, even if it’s fair.”"

"I want to tell the rebels that I am alive. That I'm right here in District Eight, where the Capitol has just bombed a hospital full of unarmed men, women, and children. There will be no survivors. [...] I want to tell people that if you think for one second the Capitol will treat us fairly if there's a cease-fire, you're deluding yourself. Because you know who they are and what they do. [...] This is what they do! And we must fight back! [...] President Snow says he's sending us a message? Well, I have one for him. You can torture us and bomb us and burn our districts to the ground, but do you see that?" We're with the camera, tracking to the planes burning on the roof of the warehouse. Tight on the Capitol seal on a wing, which melts back into the image of my face, shouting at the president. "Fire is catching! And if we burn ... you burn with us!"

""This is your earpiece. I will give you exactly one more chance to wear it. If you remove it from your ear again, I'll have you fitted with this." He holds up some sort of metal headgear that I instantly name the head shackle. "It's an alternative audio unit that locks around your skull and under your chin until it's opened with a key. And I'll have the only key. If for some reason you're clever enough to disable it,"—Haymitch dumps the head shackle on the bed and whips out a tiny silver chip—"I'll authorize them to surgically implant this transmitter into your ear so that I may speak to you twenty-four hours a day." Haymitch in my head full-time. Horrifying. "I'll keep the earpiece in," I mutter."

"Maybe everyone is just trying to protect me by lying to me. I don’t care. I’m sick of people lying to me for my own good. Because really it’s mostly for their own good. Lie to Katniss about the rebellion so she doesn’t do anything crazy."

"To hear Delly describe it, I had next to no friends because I intimidated people by being so exceptional. Not true. I had next to no friends because I wasn't friendly."

"Sometimes when I'm alone, I take the pearl from where it lives in my pocket and try to remember the boy with the bread, the strong arms that warded off nightmares on the train, the kisses in the arena. To make myself put a name to the thing I've lost. But what's the use? It's gone. He's gone. Whatever existed between us is gone. All that's left is my promise to kill Snow. I tell myself this ten times a day."

""I don't stand a chance if he doesn't get better. You'll never be able to let him go. You'll always feel wrong about being with me." "The way I always felt wrong kissing him because of you," I say."

"Even in the Capitol, there’s nothing to match the magnificence of this old building. But there is no give to the surface—only my flesh yields, my warmth taken. Stone conquers people every time."

""We didn't bomb the train tunnel, you know. Some of them will probably get out." "And then we'll shoot them when they show their faces?" I ask. "Only if we have to," he answers."

"You could save a lot of lives, Katniss."

"I'm not their slave," the man mutters. "I am," I say. "That’s why I killed Cato … and he killed Thresh … and he killed Clove … and she tried to kill me. It just goes around and around, and who wins? Not us. Not the districts. Always the Capitol. But I'm tired of being a piece in their Games."

""Was there fighting after I was shot?" "Not much. The workers from the Nut turned on the Capitol soldiers. The rebels just sat by and watched," he says. "Actually, the whole country just sat by and watched." "Well, that’s what they do best," I say."

"All those months of taking it for granted that Peeta thought I was wonderful are over. Finally, he can see me for who I really am. Violent. Distrustful. Manipulative. Deadly. And I hate him for it."

"So, now that we’re dead, what’s our next move?"

"You're still trying to protect me. Real or not real," he whispers. "Real," I answer. It seems to require more explanation. "Because that's what you and I do. Protect each other.""

"I think...you still have no idea. The effect you can have."

"Closing my eyes doesn’t help. Fire burns brighter in the darkness."

"I refuse for this to be true. Some things even I can't survive. I utter my first words since my sister's death. "I don't believe you." Snow shakes his head in mock disappointment. "Oh, my dear Miss Everdeen. I thought we had agreed not to lie to each other.""

"I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despite being one myself. I think that Peeta was onto something about us destroying one another and letting some decent species take over. Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children’s lives to settle its differences."

"“Are you preparing for another war, Plutarch?” I ask. “Oh, not now. Now we’re in that sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated,” he says. “But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We’re fickle, stupid beings with a great gift for self-destruction. Although who knows? Maybe this will be it, Katniss.” “What?” I ask. “The time it sticks. Maybe we are witnessing the evolution of the human race. Think about that.“"

"It was the waste of a trip. She's not here," I tell him. Buttercup hisses again. "She's not here. You can hiss all you like. You won't find Prim." At her name, he perks up. Raises his flattened ears. Begins to meow hopefully. "Get out!" He dodges the pillow I throw at him. "Go away! There's nothing left for you here!" I start to shake, furious with him. "She's not coming back! She's never ever coming back here again!" I grab another pillow and get to my feet to improve my aim. Out of nowhere, the tears begin to pour down my cheeks. "She's dead." I clutch my middle to dull the pain. Sink down on my heels, rocking the pillow, crying. "She's dead, you stupid cat. She's dead."

"Buttercup begins to wail as well. He circles me, just out of reach, as wave after wave of sobs racks my body, until eventually I fall unconscious. But he must understand. He must know that the unthinkable has happened and to survive will require previously unthinkable acts. Because hours later, when I come to in my bed, he's there in the moonlight. Crouched beside me, yellow eyes alert, guarding me from the night."

"I know this would have happened anyway. That what I need to survive is not Gale's fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that. So after, when he whispers, "You love me. Real or not real?" I tell him, "Real.""

"The questions are just beginning. The arenas have been completely destroyed, the memorials built, there are no more Hunger Games. But they teach about them at school, and the girl knows we played a role in them. The boy will know in a few years."

"I'll tell them how I survive it. I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could be taken away. That's when I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I've seen someone do. It's like a game. Repetitive. Even a little tedious after more than twenty years. But there are much worse games to play."

""Lucy Gray," he said in his normal voice. "Lucy Gray. It's not too late to work something out." Of course, it was, but he owed her nothing. Certainly not the truth."

"He passed Pluribus's nightclub and allowed himself a small smile. A person could get rat poison at any number of places, but he'd surreptiously scooped up a pinch of it from the back alley last week and taken it home. It'd been tricky getting it into the morphling bottle, especially using gloves, but eventually he'd squeezed what he judged to be a sufficient dose through the opening. He'd taken the precaution of making sure the bottle was wiped clean. There was nothing to make Dean Highbottom suspicious of it when he pulled it from the trash and slipped it into his pocket. Nothing when he unscrewed the dropper and dripped the morphling onto his tongue. Although he couldn't help hoping that, as the dean drew his final breath, he'd realize what so many others had realized when they'd challenged him. What all of Panem would know one day. What was inevitable. Snow lands on top."

"When you've been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?"

"The upside of being born on reaping day is that you can sleep late on your birthday. It's pretty much downhill from there."

"No way to control the outcome of the reaping or whatever follows it. So don't feed the nightmares. Don't let yourself panic. Don't give the Capitol that. They've taken enough already."

"Well, you know I like my pretty with a purpose."

"And I love you like all-fire."

"Lately the theme has been "No Peace" and the slogans bombard you from every side. NO PEACE, NO BREAD! NO PEACE, NO SECURITY! and of course, NO PEACEKEEPERS, NO PEACE! NO CAPITOL, NO PEACE! Hanging behind the temporary stage in front of the Justice Building is a huge banner of President Snow's face with the words PANEM'S #1 PEACEKEEPER."

"They will not use our tears for their entertainment."

"...I'm grateful for her final gift. That she's denied Plutarch the chance to broadcast our farewell. The moment our hearts shattered? It belongs to us."

"Her people were great travelers once, going from district to district to perform their music. Tam Amber remembers it, as he was about my age when the war ended and the Peacekeepers rounded up the Covey, killing all the adults and confining the kids to our district."

"'You should only alienate folks when you mean and want to do it. [...] It should never be an accident.'"

"The temperature of the room dropped fast."

"Perhaps he'd want me to conjure up an illusion. That might be fun: there was bound to be a way of misinterpreting his request and upsetting him†."

"When I landed on the top of a lamppost in the London dusk it was peeing with rain."

"No magical alarm sounded, though I did hit my head five times on a pebble†."

"Remember this." he said in a soft voice. "Demons are very wicked. They will hurt you if they can. Do you understand this?"

"The old pain had started up again, throbbing in my chest, stomach, bones. It wasn't healthy to be encased in a body for so long. How humans can stand it without going completely mad, I'll never know.†"

"I'm Martha. And you are...?" A small snuffle, a smaller voice. "Nathaniel."

"I order you, Bartimaeus, to reveal whether you have diligently and wholly carried out your charge-" "Of course I have - what do you think this is, costume jewelry?"

"Too much hate is bad for you," I ventured. "Why?" "Um..."

"H-he is a messenger for you. H-h-he brings a message." "You stagger me, Simpkin! A messenger with a message! Extraordinary."

"The darkness cloaking my mind lifted. Instantly, I was as alert as ever, crystal-sharp in all my perceptions, a coiled spring ready to explode into action. It was time to escape! Except it wasn't."

"I know you," he said. "I know your scent. Long ago, yes, but I never forget. I know your name." "A friend of a friend, perhaps?" I eyed his spear-tip nervously. Unlike Eagle-beak, he didn't wave it about at all. "No... an enemy..." "Terrible when you can't remember something that's right on the tip of your tongue," I observed. "Isn't it, though? And you try so hard to recall it, but often as not you can't because some fool's interrupting you, prattling away so you can't concentrate, and-" Bull-head gave a bellow of rage. "Shut up! I almost had it then!"

""Woken up, have you?" the woman said. Her voice was like broken glass in an ice bucket.†"

"In the middle of the lawn was a lake adorned with an ornamental fountain, depicting an amorous Greek god trying to kiss a dolphin.†"

"Take that stupid grin off your face," he said. "You're putting me off." "Sorry." I adopted a hideous expression of malady and woe. "That's not much better."

"So I departed, leaving behind a pungent smell of brimstone. Just something to remember me by."

"I'm only introducing it because of a small sub-clause in an Official Charge that escaped my notice a year or two back. Unfortunately the author didn't forget. Like elephants, authors are – nothing contractual escapes them."

"A better plan would be to head straight for Bart's Guide to London, since that's hugely entertaining and witty, i.e. written by me."

"As part of my current charge I have been instructed to provide an occasional journal of my recent activities*."

"Monday In Other Place. Did nothing."

"Tuesday Ditto."

"Wednesday Yep, same again. Saw a few nice whirling colours and things. That's it. Easy, this journal lark, isn't it?"

"Today summoned painfully to earth by a short fat English magician with a dangerous stammer*."

"No attack yet by Archmage. Wish he'd hurry up."

"Spy three suspicious butterflies flitting over hedge. Check the planes. Yep, small foliots, arms flapping wildly. Wasp rises up behind them, shoots down out of sun, zaps them with Infernos, one, two, three. Burning butterflies crash-land in pond. Alert master to my triumph. She inspects charred fragments. Her scowl deepens; turns out they were her slaves, returning with valuable information."

"[T]he magician emerges from bed and we recount our tale. Her response lacks gratitude: stammering furiously, she chides us for the damage to her lawns and flowerbed. The boy is smacked; I am Spasmed; we both spend the day with nail-clippers attending to the damage to the garden."

"The boy did the preliminaries, sealing the circles, erecting the bonds. Now we were all subject to the rules of the summoning. But then he stopped. He did not progress. The woman looked at him furiously. "I've forgotten it," he said."

"The boy shrugged. "I've forgotten it," was all he said. And then, "I guess I wasn't taught well enough.""

"Maybe I'd better call a halt to the journal for a bit. Until something crops up, that is, which it hopefully won't for a couple of decades. In the meantime: farewell, enjoy your futile lives, etc. This is Bartimaeus, care of The Other Place, signing off."

"Together, we must advance unafraid into the modern age!"

"She just took off running to the old Perkins place. He couldn't help turning to watch. She ran as though it was her nature. It reminded him of the flight of wild ducks in the autumn. So smooth. The word "beautiful" came to his mind, but he shook it away and hurried up to his house."

"He felt there in the teachers' room that it was the beginning of a new season in his life, and he chose deliberately to make it so. He did not have to make any announcement to Leslie that he had changed his mind about her. She already knew it."

"When Leslie spoke, the words rolled out so regally, you knew she was a proper queen. He could hardly manage English, much less the poetic language of a king."

"He was angry, too, because it would soon be Christmas and he had nothing to give Leslie. It was not that she would expect something expensive; it was that he needed to give her something as much as he needed to eat when he was hungry. [...] She wouldn't laugh at him no matter what he gave her. But for his own sake he had to give her something he could be proud of."

"Even a prince may be a fool"

""Why don't we change our clothes and watch TV or something over at your house?" He felt like hugging her. "I'll make us some coffee," he said joyfully. "Yuk," she said smiling and began to run for the old Perkins place, that beautiful, graceful run of hers that neither mud nor water could defeat."

"Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts."

"If there was anything her short life had taught her, it was that a person must be tough. Otherwise, you were had."

"Trotter its all wrong. Nothing turned out the way it was supposed to." "How do you mean supposed to? Life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough." [..] "If life is so bad, how come you're so happy?" "Did I say bad? I said it was tough. Nothing to make you happy like doing good on a tough job, now is there?"

"(Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?) Katherine Paterson’s books — which were almost traumatizing to me as a kid, but which I appreciate now for challenging me and my worldview."

"Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water."

"Who in the universe halts when the enemy tells them to?"

"'It desolates me to disappoint you, but your brother is not here. Despite two really praiseworthy attempts at rescue.'"

"It would have been funny if I had been an observer and not a participant, an idea that gave me a disconcerting insight into gossip. As I talked beside the silent Tamara, I realized that despite how entertaining certain stories were, at the bottom of every item of gossip there was someone getting hurt."

"If more people recognized the difference between friendship and mere attraction, and how love must partake of both to prosper, I expect there'd be more happy people."

"If your opponent is better armed and has longer reach, then surprise is your only ally. And then you'd better hope he's half asleep."

"I realized that despite how entertaining certain stories were, at the bottom of every item of gossip there was someone getting hurt."

"I've been working hard at assuming Court polish, but the more I learn about what really goes on behind the pretty voices and waving fans and graceful bows, the more I comprehend that what is really said matters little, so long as the manner in which it is said pleases. I understand it, but I don't like it. Were I truly influential, then I would halt this foolishness that decrees that in Court one cannot be sick; that to admit you are sick is really to admit to political or social or romantic defeat; that to admit to any emotions usually means one really feels the opposite. It is a terrible kind of falsehood that people can only claim feelings as a kind of social weapon."

"Nothing is "always," my dear. Except the greater truths, one of which is that power begets politics, and politics are more dangerous than war because there are fewer rules."

"Judging the actions of the many by those of the one is both human and dangerous."

"What might have happened to them to make them the way they were? It did not change what they now did, but it changed, profoundly, how he perceived their motivations, their place in the world."

"Choose the duty that you can most effectively execute: that is, finally, all we can do in life."

"Angry men with pointy things sent to secure a foreign city are pretty much alike anywhere. That's what I've heard. So far nothing's convinced me different."

"He’d spent his entire exile schooling himself to face that he would never get what he wanted. People didn’t, sometimes. So you made a life as best you could."

"It is a shame when we must regard a people as an enemy. It is a shame and a regret when the two peoples share so much. And it is a shame, a regret, and a tragedy when those peoples meet as individuals and find much to admire."

"I am old, but the word to me means familiar, comfortable. Accustomed after long and venerable use. Not dilapidated and useless."

"War is a convenient fix for government problems if it happens somewhere else. To other people."

"Finally someone takes me seriously enough to ask for my word of honor, and it’s a villain."

"'What's it really like to always be the prettiest person in a room? Dos it mean you're always acting as if in a play, because no one stops looking at you?'"

"When in doubt, be ridiculous."

"'What if feeling good only comes after you destroy someone you hate?'"

"'That's not good, that's triumph.'"

"'Are they trained to treat everyone as a servant?'"

"'Probably. That doesn't make you into one.'"

"He wrote stories about everything he saw, and he saw a lot. He walked through the streets of Brooklyn along the water, or leaned against the store windows on Livingston Street watching people hurrying along, making up stories about this one or that one."

"With just the sweep of a pen, Thomas, you can change the world, all of it."

"If only she could have held on to that day, held on to that moment forever, grasped it in her fists so it wouldn't escape. If only."

"Thomas watched him for a few minutes. Pop was good-looking, muscular, and his hair was almost gold even though it was getting a little thin on top. Thomas must have taken after his mother, whoever she was."

"But that was a realworld, and he didn't have to put it down on paper. He ripped the page out of the book, tore it into shreds, and threw them behind the tree, where they settled into the weeds."

""A new start," Pop said as they stopped at the corner and waited to cross over to where te horse and cart waited for them. "A new apartment, Thomas. A new life." A new world to write about."

"Is there anyone noisier in the world than Bird Mallon?"

"And the boy was right in back of her, his neck thin as a pencil. "My name is Thomas," he said. "Thomas Neary." She didn't answer. "The horse's name is Alfred, in case you want to know." He screwed up his face. "Or maybe Fernando.""

"Bird. A good name for her. She wasn't a sparrow or a songbird, though. She stood so straight, and her face was strong."

"I don't think he's touched a washcloth to his face since the day he was born."

"Everything stopped: forks half raised, a bowl being passed. It seemed that the man was bathed in red, great swaths of it across his shirt and hands. And then Thomas realized: he was covered in blood."

"How quiet everything was this Sunday afternoon, how still. No horse and wagon clopped down the street, no cart; no one stood on the corner talking. It was as if they were the only ones in the world."

"How many times had she seen Annie sew in a sleeve, easing both sides so that they wouldn't pucker, taking a stitch, and smoothing out the fabric again? And now Mama was doing the same thing to someone's head. Someone's skin."

"She gives him candy. They're probably going to get married."

"How could she know what she wanted to do with her life? All these years she thought she'd be a healer like Mama, and now she knew it was never going to happen."

"Writing wasn't easy for her. It wasn't like arithmetic, not like a column of numbers to be added or subtracted from the top of the blackboard to the bottom, neat and organized; or science, figuring out the why of things."

"Outside it had begun to rain, a fine mist of a rain: fall leaves were plastered to the walkway, and puddles filled with bits of hay and coal lay in the street. A nice bit to remember for the writing. Water Street! He loved to look at it."

"He was laughing again. What was it about Bird that made him do that?"

"No one in the world like my sister Birdie."

"Sometimes in life you have to do the hardest things to get somewhere—to change your life."

"He remembered everything. Maybe that was why he was such a great writer. What he remembered he'd put on paper, but it came out different, more interesting, more exciting than she'd ever been able to imagine."

"What had it been like the first time Da tried to read the same page? She could almost see his finger under each word, the whisper of his voice as he sounded out the words to himself. How had he ever done that? It seemed impossible."

"The girl's mouth was chapped, tight and pinched, her skin dry. Mama would say she looked woebegone, but as Bird looked at her eyes, the word she thought of was desperate."

"She didn't want to touch the baby. Didn't want to know if she was dead. But still she reached down, her arms underneath that small body, and pulled it up against her. The body was burning with fever. But alive. Alive!"

"What was the use of writing if someone didn't read what you have to say?"

"He knew what she'd be reading first as she started from the beginning, reading what he'd had to say when he was younger, and then growing older, stories at first about tiny mice who lived in families in back of the wall, and stories about school, and apartments in Greenpoint and Carnasie and Flatbush, elves in Ireland that he'd pictured as Pop had told him about them, and the woman with lace on her sleeves. She kept turning pages, and then halfway through, she whispered, "Water Street." Thomas knew she was reading now about a boy who listened at a register, thinking about a family, and a lighthouse, and then she turned the next page and took a breath. It was the story he really wanted her to see: a story about a girl who though less of herself than everyone else did, who worried about everyone, even when she didn't want to, even when it made her irritable. A girl who was afraid, and who hardly knew it yet, but was on her way to being a healer like her mother, because there'd never be anything else for her, and how lucky they were just to know her."

"She wanted to put her head down on her knees and close her eyes. She felt the way she had years ago when she'd tumbled down the stairs and had the wind knocked out of her: a pain in the chest and stomach so strong it was hard to breathe."

"How different everyone looked. How louldly they talked about who was starting work tomorrow, who would start in a week, while Sister Raymond sat at her desk looking serene. Bird felt a lurch in her chest. Of all of them, she though, she might be the one who'd miss school the most."

"Leave it to Annie. She knew everything."

"But what gave him the most satisfaction was going back through the pages to read about his first story appearing in the Saturday Evening Post. That afternoon he'd bought Bird the largest bag of lemon drops he could find. "He gives her candy," she had said, remembering too."

"Every kid should have a hobby—just not this one."

"Itchingham Lofte had caused explosions before. There had, in truth, been many bangs, flashes, and smells coming from his bedroom in the past. His multi-stained carpet and pockmarked walls were a testament to that. But there had been nothing like this explosion—it made even more of an imact than the small earthquake that had rippled under Cornwall a few months before."

"…everyone called him Itch except his mother, whose bright idea it had been to name him Itchingham in the first place."

"There should be a law against parents using sarcasm, thought Itch."

"The school had been designated a "Science Academy" and attracted many sponsors: charities, eminent scientists, and a global oil company. The academy logo proclaimed: Together. Inspired. No one seemed quite sure what it meant."

"But the only person who was ever pleased to see him was Jack. She realized that Itch was a little different, but she was happy to tolerate that. When Itch started to tell her about the chemical composition of her Twix or why her apple was turning brown, she would just flick his ear or poke him with a pencil. "Don't be boring, Itch, or I'll tell you more about Gossip Girl." This mention of Jack's favorite TV show was usually enough to stop Itch in his tracks."

"He turned and smiled at his class. "Morning boys, let's begin." His homeroom class had given up pointing out that they were more than fifty percent girls and just accepted that by "boys" he meant everyone. Mr. Watkins had come from an all-boys school in Edinburgh five years earlier and he was clearly not about to change the way he addressed his students."

"Ms. Glenacre was, it seemed, approaching her hundredth birthday and had never had a nice thought about anybody in her life."

"Grace Glenacre forgot that she had been sick. Now she was furious. "How dare you? How dare you?!" she shouted. "I don't think I have ever sworn at a member if the staff before, but I'm going to now." She swore at him. "I have no idea what just happened in there, but twenty-seven sick kids and one sick teacher is not hysteria." Her voice was rising. "It's not hysteria, do you hear me!" Flowerdew stood up. "You're clearly hysterical," he said. "We'll talk later.""

"Itch thought that Jay seemed to spend all of her time either eating her potato chips or picking her nose. Today she was managing both, bag balanced on lap, one hand for each task. Classy, he thought."

"I'm sure 'I used it all, just to be on the safe side' is not the greatest piece of scientific advice out there!"

"Maybe the body finds untapped reserves when it needs to; maybe the fear of dying makes it do extraordinary things."

"Wells surprised himself by handing her the book. "What's your name?" he asked. "So you know to whom you'll be eternally indebted?" "So I know who to blame when I'm arrested." The girl tucked the book under her arm and then extended her hand. "Clarke." "Wells," he said, reaching forward to shake it. He smiled, and this time it didn't hurt."

"You have been given an unprecedented chance to put the past behind you," the Chancellor was saying. "The mission on which you're about to embark is dangerous, but your bravery will be rewarded. If you succeed, your infractions will be forgiven, and you'll be able to start new lives on Earth."

"Bellamy worried about her constantly. The kid was special, and he'd do anything to give her a chance at a different life. Anything to make up for what she'd had to endure."

"She turned over her shoulder and caught his eye, shaking her head slightly, a clear warning not to do anything stupid. But Bellamy had been doing stupid things all his life, and he had no intention of stopping now."

"I may be biased, but I think I have the best readers ever."

"There’s no way to please everyone, because that mythical book with the ending that every single person wants can’t exist—you want different things, each one of you. The only thing I can do, in light of that fact, is write an honest story as best I can."

"I thought about reaching out with my authorial hand and snatching her from that awful situation. I thought about it and I agonized over it. But to me, that felt dishonest and emotionally manipulative. This was the end she had chosen, and I felt she had earned an ending that was as powerful as she was."

"He doesn’t like the ceiling that blocks his view of the stars. And he doesn’t like religious spaces, in general—the obsession with wrong and right, purity and pollution, modernity and eternity, it doesn’t make sense to him."

"As far as Niko knows, that’s nonsense, but mortals are always devising nonsense."

"“As a general rule, I don’t feel the need to antagonize people,” Niko says. “There’s plenty of anger in the world already. But it can be interesting to see how people react.”"

"When someone targets innocents among my people, then yes. I hunt them. And I think the world is better for it."

"Gentle souls cast as devils in humankind’s ongoing stage play of existence. It’s Oppression 101: find a bad guy, and if you can’t, make one up."

"Suffering isn’t atonement."

"“Don’t fear pain, Dymek,” he said. “Fear…losing your purpose, losing your family, losing yourself. Those things are worse than pain.”"

"“You want me to be jealous?” “Can you blame me for being curious what it feels like?” Niko smiles a little. “I am what I am, after all.” “Some people would call that a red flag.” “The fact that I can turn into a deadly monster in an instant should be a much bigger, redder flag.”"

"One of the great lies humanity tells is that time produces wisdom. Oh, Ala will concede that time creates more opportunities for a person to become wise, but it’s hardly a guarantee."

"He feels like there’s a hand tugging him back toward the house where Dymitr is being tortured by people who claim to love him. But they don’t love him, Niko thinks. Because if love doesn’t allow change, then what the fuck is that love worth?"

"“You need to calm down,” Ala says to him, her eyes closed. “I can’t concentrate with you scared like this, it’s like you’re waterboarding me with hot chocolate.”"

"“There’s nothing otherworldly about you.” “Oh really?” Niko laughs a little. “The fact that I can make you see things that aren’t there, that seems completely ordinary to you?” “Hallucinogenic mushrooms can also make me see things that aren’t there. I don’t call them supernatural, either.”"

"“Do you know,” it says, “a zmora can tell the difference between dread and fear. A person fears what’s unknown, but they dread what’s known.”"

"[T]hat’s something Roth does extraordinarily well – explain the toughest parts of life. Love, loss, heartbreak, joy and faith."

"Veronica Roth has a very blunt and not-so-sugarcoated way of killing people off."

""You just hatched out two weeks ago." Kludd turned to Soren, his younger brother. "What do you know about sisters?" Maybe, Soren thought to himself, they would be better than brothers."

"Once upon a very long time ago, in the time of Glaux, there was an order of knightly owls, from a kingdom called Ga'Hoole, who would rise up each night and perform noble deeds. They spoke no words but true ones, their purpose was to right all wrongs, to make strong the weak, mend the broken, vanquish the proud, and make powerless those who abused the frail. With hearts sublime they would take flight..."

""I don't really know what happened. I just fell out of the nest." But the second Soren said those words he felt a weird queasiness. He almost knew. He just couldn't quite remember, but he almost knew how it had happened, and he felt a mixture of dread and shame creep through him. He felt something terrible deep in his gizzard."

"Gylfie felt that the moment was right. "You are the last owl in the world that I would ever say lacked humility, 12-8. You are for my friend and myself a perfect example of humility. You are beyond humbleness! You are ..." Gylfie was madly searching for a word. What's she going to say next? Soren couldn't imagine. He had never seen such a demonstration of outrageous fawning. "You are subglaucious." 12-8 blinked at the word as did Soren, who had no idea what subglaucious meant. "We, my friend and I, only wish that we could serve in the eggorium and thus attain such humbleness as yourself." "Your words are kind, 25-2. I shall hope that they might encourage me in my continuing quest for humility while in service to a great cause." She wandered off looking a tad more moon blinked than before, if that was possible. "What in Glaux's name is subglaucious?" Soran said as soon as she was out of earshot. "No idea. I made it up.""

"Bye-bye," Auntie cooed, and waved a tattered wing. "Bye-bye, 12-8, you fool!"

"Gylfie looked at Soren gravely. "That is why we must learn how to fly before the next newing." "But I won't be ready. I won't have enough feathers," Soren said. "Almost, though." "Almost? There's a difference, Gylfie, between almost and enough." "Yes. The difference is belief, Soren. Belief.""

"Oh, if only I were perfectly moon blinked [hypnotized]. If only I were..."

"You can do it! You believe! Feel it in your gizzard. You are a creature of flight. Fly, my children. Fly!"

"I have redeemed myself by giving belief to the wings of the young. Blessed are those who believe, for indeed they shall fly."

"[After discovering Soren's former home is abandoned] Then Twilight spoke, "Soren, they're gone. Maybe something happened to them. You shouldn't take it personally. Buck up now, old buddy." "Personally? What do you know, Twilight, that is personal about any family? You've never had a family. Remember, you're always telling us about how much you learned in your own orphan school of tough learning. You don't know the feel of a mother's down. You don't know what it's like to hear stories from a father, or to hear him sing. Do you know what a psalm is, Twilight? I bet you don't. Well, we Barn Owls know about psalms and books and the feeling of down." Twilight's feathers had ruffled up, spiky with ice crystals. He looked fearsome. "I'll tell you what I know, you miserable little owl. The whole world is my family. I know the softness of a fox's fur, and the strange green light that comes into their eyes during the spring moons. I know how to fish because I learned from an eagle. And when meat is scarce I know how to find the ripest part of a rotten tree and peck the juiciest bugs from it. I know plenty.""

"Gylfie turned to Digger and spoke, "Come with us, Digger." "But where is it you're going?" he asked. "To the Great Ga'Hoole Tree." "What?" said Digger, but before Twilight could answer, Streak broke in. "I've heard of that place, but isn't it just a story, a legend?" "To some it might be," Twilight said, and blinked at the eagle. But not to owls, thought Soren. To owls, he thought, it is a real place."

"My dad was a Presbyterian minister. Yes, I am one of those dreaded P.K.s — Preacher's Kids. Be afraid. Be very afraid…"

"My favorite word is "redemption." I like both its meaning and the sound. My least favorite word is "maybe." "Maybe" is almost always a "no" drawn out in cruel fashion."

"I have an artificial left eye. I lost my real eye in a car accident when I was eighteen. In fact, I had to have my entire face rebuilt because I smashed it up pretty good. It took six years and thirteen surgeries. However, I did have the pleasure of freezing a plastic eyeball in an ice cube, putting it in a friend's drink, ("Eyeball in your highball?") and watching him freak completely. Okay, so maybe that's not going down on my good karma record. But it sure was fun."

"I'm related to Davy Crockett on my mom's side. Honest."

"I'm one of those people who has to write. If I don't write, I feel itchy and depressed and cranky. So everybody's glad when I write and stop complaining already."

"People always think they know other people, but they don’t. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won’t eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they don’t know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel fucked up and sad for no reason at all."

"You’ve been assigned an identity since birth. Then you spend the rest of your life walking around in it to see if it really fits. You try on all these different selves and abandon just as many. But really it’s about dismantling all that false armor, getting down to what’s real."

"“Oh, hello," Dr. M says, shaking Balder's hand. "Wonderful costume. I'm a bit of a role player myself on the weekends. Tell me, where did you get the helmet?" "It was forged in the North, blessed by the hands of Odin, given to me by my mother, Frigg," Balder answers. "Lovely. I got mine on the Internet.”"

"Balder holds up a completely blank rune. Wyrd. The beginning and the end. Fate. I don't know what that means, but it's not doing anything to uncreep me."

"The dark does not weep for itself because there is no light. Rather, it accepts that it is the dark. It is said that even the gods must die." He winks. "But not without one hell of a fight.”"

"Marisol does a silly dance with Balder and the screw, one in each hand, so that nobody gets the idea that she takes tins — or anything else, for that matter — seriously. And just like that, something in the cosmos shifts. A butterfly flaps its wings in South America. Snow falls in Chicago. You give an idiot a stupid magic screw and it turns out to be a necessary part after all."

"In our travels, we have come across many equations — math for understanding the universe, for making music, for mapping stars, and also for tipping, which is important. Here is our favorite equation: Us plus Them equals All of Us. It is very simple math. Try it sometime. You probably won’t even need a pencil."

"These are hard times. The world hurts. We live in fear and forget to walk with hope. But hope has not forgotten you. So ask it to dinner. It's probably hungry and would appreciate the invitation."

"I was pretty sure you’d be weird. But now that I’ve met you, I can honestly say you’re even weirder."

"Gansey had once told Adam that he was afraid most people didn't know how to handle Ronan. What he meant by this was that he was worried that one day someone would fall on Ronan and cut themselves."

"If I were a tree, I would have no reason to love a human."

"I guess I make things that need energy stronger. I'm like a walking battery." "You're the table everyone wants at Starbucks," Gansey mused as he began to walk again. Blue blinked. "What?" Over his shoulder, Gansey said, "Next to the wall plug."

""We have to be back in three hours," Ronan said. "I just fed Chainsaw but she'll need it again." "This," Gansey replied "is precisely why I didn't want to have a baby with you.”"

"He strode over to the ruined church. This, Blue had discovered, was how Gansey got places - striding. Walking was for ordinary people."

"Gansey's partying with his mother," Ronan said. He smelled like beer. "And Noah's fucking dead. But Parrish is here"

"Aglionby Academy was the number one reason Blue had developed her two rules: One, stay away from boys because they were trouble. And two, stay away from Aglionby boys, because they were bastards."

"His eyes were frighteningly alive, the curve of his mouth savage and pleased. It suddenly didn't seem at all surprising that he should be able to pull things from his dreams. In that moment, Blue was a little in love with all of them. Their magic. Their quest. Their awfulness and strangeness. Her raven boys."

"And Ronan was everything that was left: molten eyes and a smile made for war."

"She wore a dress Ronan thought looked like a lampshade. Whatever sort of lamp it belonged on, Gansey clearly wished he had one. Ronan wasn't a fan of lamps."

"A secret is a strange thing. There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid. And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it. Sometimes, some rare times, a secret stays undiscovered because it is something too big for the mind to hold. It is too strange, too vast, too terrifying to contemplate. All of us have secrets in our lives. We’re keepers or keptfrom, players or played. Secrets and cockroaches — that’s what will be left at the end of it all."

"I am being perfectly fucking civil."

"Dying's a boring side effect."

"He was brother to a liar and brother to an angel, son of a dream and son of a dreamer."

"His second secret was Adam Parrish."

""This is the lady I spoke to on the phone all those months ago, right? How small she is. Are you done growing?" "What!" Blue said. Gansey felt it was time to remove Malory from the terminal."

"As they moved through the old barn, Adam felt Ronan's eyes glance off him and away, his disinterest practised but incomplete. Adam wondered if anyone else noticed. Part of him wished they did and immediately felt bad, because it was vanity, really: See, Adam Parrish is wantable, worthy of a crush, not just by anyone, someone like Ronan, who could want Gansey or anyone else and chose Adam for his hungry eyes"

"We are going so slow," Noah said, craning his neck to observe the inevitable queue behind them. "I think I just saw a tricycle pass us." "Rude."

""You guys have a death list?" Ronan broke in. "That is fucking dark. Am I on it?" "Some days, I wish," Blue said."

"She turned to Gansey. "Blue," he warned, but his voice was chaotic. This close, his throat was scented with mint and wool sweater and vinyl car seat, and Gansey, just Gansey. She said, "I just want to pretend. I want to pretend that I could.""

"She seemed to have neither sense of fullness nor taste, and would often combine foods in manners that struck Blue as problematic. She didn't believe in telling people how to live their lives (well, maybe a little), but it was hard to stand by and watch Gwenllian spread peanut butter on a cold hot dog."

"Adam had turned down so many offers for help from Gansey. Money for school, money for food, money for rent. Pity and charity, Adam had thought. For so long, he'd wanted Gansey to see him as an equal, but it was possible that all this time, the only person who needed to see that was Adam. Now he could see that it wasn't charity Gansey was offering. It was just truth. And something else: friendship of the unshakable kind. Friendships you could swear on. That could be busted nearly to breaking and come stronger than before."

""Sorry," he said. "I was being sort of a dick." Noah replied, "We weren't going to say it." "I was," Blue said."

""Where the hell is Ronan?" Gansey asked, echoing the words that thousands of humans had uttered since mankind developed speech."

"Gansey asked, "Do you have time to run an errand with us? Do you have work? Homework?" "No homework. I got suspended," Blue replied. "Get the fuck out," Ronan said, but with admiration. "Sargent, you asshole." Blue reluctantly allowed him to bump fists with her."

"Do you love him?" Maura asked curiously. "I'd rather not," Blue replied. "He has lots of negative qualities I can help you hone in on," her mother offered. "I'm already aware of them. Infinitely."

"It was not my finest moment," Henry said. "My car and I have since made amends." "His electric car," Gansey inserted with subtlety, in case Blue had missed the environmental ramifications. Blue narrowed her eyes at Gansey and then pointed out, "You could bike to Aglionby from here." Henry wagged a finger. "True, true. But it is important to practise safe bicycling, and they have not yet made a helmet to accommodate my hair."

"His feelings for Adam were an oil spill; he'd let them overflow and now there wasn't a damn place in the ocean that wouldn't catch fire if he dropped a match."

"It was this,: the future hanging heavy in the air, and Henry starting a quiet, drunk conversation about whether or not Blue would like to travel to Venezuela with him. Blue replying softly that she would, she very much would, and Gansey hearing the longing in her voice like he was being undone, like his own feelings were unbearably mirrored. I cant come? Gansey asked. Yes, you can meet us there in a fancy plane, Henry said. Don't be fooled by his fancy hair, Blue interjected, Gansey would hike. And warmth filled the empty caverns in Gansey's heart. He felt known."

"Blue said, "I can't get in this car. Do you know what's happening behind me? I don't even want to look." Henry said, "How about you give me the finger and shout at me now and withdraw with your principles?" He smiled winningly and held up three fingers. He counted to two with devil horns. "This is incredibly unnecessary," Blue told him, but she could feel herself smiling. "Life's a show," he replied. He counted one with his middle finger, and then his face melted into exaggerated shock. Blue shouted, "Drop dead, you bastard!" "FINE!" Henry screamed back, with slightly more hysteria than the role required. He attempted to squeal out of the lot, stopped to take off the parking brake, and then limped out more sedately.""

"Once when Adam had still lived in the trailer park, he had been pushing the lawn mower around the straggly side yard when he realized that it was raining a mile away. He could smell it, the earthy scent of rain on dirt, but also the electric, restless smell of ozone. And he could see it: a hazy sheet of water blocking his view of the mountains. He could track the line of rain travelling across the vast dry field towards him. It was heavy and dark, and he knew he would get drenched if he stayed outside. It was coming from so far away that he had plenty of time to put the mower away and get under cover. Instead, though, he just stood there. he closed his eyes and let the storm soak him. That was this kiss."

"Mace," I said, struck by a thought, "did you ever think that all those people in those cars have a whole separate story to them, that it's just as important to them as our stuff is to us, and we don't know anything about it. Maybe sometime we'll run across somebody and two years ago they were driving past us on the highway and we never knew it. Like sometimes we meet people and bump off of them and never see them again and we never know why paths cross."

"It was weird being lonesome in a place full of people."

"I remembered what Jamie had said, that love doesn't solve anything. Maybe. But it helps."

"“No!” Audrey smacked me in the chest. “You eat that bacon and you love it because it’s delicious. You don’t fret over whether you’ll ever have bacon again. You just eat the bacon.”"

"She found, however, that revenge hurts nobody quite so much as the one who tries to inflict it."

"But feeling is so different from knowing. My common sense tells me all you can say, but there are times when common sense has no power over me. Common nonsense takes possession of my soul."

"What a comfort one familiar face is in a howling wilderness of strangers!"

""Why did you kill Maurice Lennox?" she asked reproachfully."

"I wouldn't give up altogether," said Mr. Harrison reflectively. "I'd write a story once in a while, but I wouldn't pester editors with it. I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne—I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men in the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them—though Mrs. Lynde believes we're all bad. But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us."

"But she lay long awake that night, nor did she wish for sleep. Her waking fancies were more alluring than any vision of dreamland. Had the real Prince come at last? Recalling those glorious dark eyes which had gazed so deeply into her own, Anne was very strongly inclined to think he had."

"And Gilbert was dying!"

"Gilbert was friendly—very friendly—far too friendly....But Anne no longer found it satisfying. The rose of love made the blossom of friendship pale and scentless by contrast."

"Anne, do you know, I believe I shall always love you after this. I don't think I'll ever feel that dreadful way about you again. Talking it all out seems to have done away with it, somehow. It's very strange—and I have thought it so real and bitter. It's like opening the door of a dark room to show some hideous creature you've believed to be there—and when the light steams in your monster turns out to have been just a shadow, vanishing when the light comes. It will never come between us again."

"A slender shapely young aspen rose up before them against the fine maize and emerald and paling rose of the western sky, which brought out every leaf and twig in dark, tremulous, elfin loveliness."

"Life had taught her to be brave, to be patient, to love, to forgive."

"Her confusion put him at ease and he forgot to be shy; besides, even the shyest of men can sometimes be quite audacious in moonlight."

"It is never quite safe to think we have done with life. When we imagine we have finished our story fate has a trick of turning the page and showing us yet another chapter."

"I like wind," he said. "A day when there is no wind seems to me dead. A windy day wakes me up." He gave a conscious laugh. "On a calm day I fall into day dreams. No doubt you know my reputation, Miss West. If I cut you dead the next time we meet don't put it down to bad manners. Please understand that it is only abstraction and forgive me—and speak to me."

"We miss so much out of life if we don't love. The more we love the richer life is—even if it is only some little furry or feathery pet."

"We stood there and talked while Elizabeth sipped her milk daintily and she told me all about Tomorrow. The Woman had told her that Tomorrow never comes, but Elizabeth knows better. It will come sometime. Some beautiful morning she will just wake up and find it is Tomorrow. Not Today but Tomorrow. And then things will happen . . . wonderful things. She may even have a day to do exactly as she likes in, with nobody watching her . . . though I think Elizabeth feels that is too good to happen even in Tomorrow. Or she may find out what is at the end of the harbor road . . . that wandering, twisting road like a nice red snake, that leads, so Elizabeth thinks, to the end of the world. Perhaps the Island of Happiness is there. Elizabeth feels sure there is an Island of Happiness somewhere where all the ships that never come back are anchored, and she will find it when Tomorrow comes."

"I remembered Elizabeth had never laughed once during our talk. I feel that she hasn't learned how. The great house is so still and lonely and laughterless. It looks dull and gloomy even now when the world is a riot of autumn color. Little Elizabeth is doing too much listening to lost whispers."

"I wended my way to the graveyard this evening," wrote Anne to Gilbert after she got home. "I think 'wend your way' is a lovely phrase and I work it in whenever I can. It sounds funny to say I enjoyed my stroll in the graveyard but I really did. Miss Courtaloe's stories were so funny. Comedy and tragedy are so mixed up in life, Gilbert. The only thing that haunts me is that tale of the two who lived together fifty years and hated each other all that time. I can't believe they really did. Somebody has said that 'hate is only love that has missed its way.' I feel sure that under the hatred they really loved each other . . . just as I really loved you all those years I thought I hated you . . . and I think death would show it to them."

"Be the day short or be the day long, at last it weareth to evening song."

"They did not talk or want to talk. It was as if they were afraid to talk for fear of spoiling something beautiful. But Anne had never felt so near Katherine Brooke before. By some magic of its own the winter night had brought them together . . . almost together but not quite."

"Fundamentally, the camera is nothing more than a light-tight box, having an arrangement for holding a light-sensitive substance (plate or film) and a device (lens or pinhole) for projecting on this sensitive substance an image of objects external to the camera."

"I said to Missionar same way. I said heads in basket. I said Soldat, bandit same way. I told Missionar."

"[A young mission worker in Shanghai told him that] China's nothing but a loosely allied group of principalities that establish whatever law there is through force of arms."

"In his country and mine, a bridge builder never sells guns. [...] In China would a scholar sell guns?"

"Soldiers get paid sometimes. Bandits have to fend for themselves. But when the warlords don't have the money, their soldier become bandits. [...] Peking's supposed to pay the warlords. I mean, they're official generals, servants of the government , right? Most of them are bandits is what I say."

"In China a general's power goes as far as his troops can march in a few days. But from what I know of General Tang, he won't let this insult pass."

"At the end of the day you want something. Even if you don't know what it is."

"Peasants can fool you They give in like sheep. They run away and hide. They offer their daughters if you'll let them alone. But suddenly one of them does a thing like this [and tries to kill you]."

"Tang is the best soldier in China"

"[H]is brain, shaped by milleniums of acceptance of authority, has formed the idea that by obeying an order, any order given by someone in authority, he can save his own life, or, perhaps more importantly, somehow protect his ancestors' land."

"An acrobat is lucky to die with the price of a coffin in his pocket."

"You Big Swords think you're good riders, good cavalrymen, but you have a long way to go, and you'll never be Mongols."

"Look, children, it's very simple. What's going to happen is this. If you people go forward, we eat bread. If you people retreat, we eat sticks. That is all there is to war. Let no one tell you different."

"His batteries north of the swamp open fire on the nearest hill, which will later be assaulted. Batteries eastward, in front of the lake and the knoll where he stands, are rolled forward almost to the transverse road, between willow trees.."

"What use the green river, the gold place, if time and death pinned human in the pocket of my land not rest from taking underground the green all-willowed and white rose and bean flower and morning-mist picnic of song in pepper-pot breast of thrush?"

"From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth."

"The word permanent... had its own kind of revenge on those who misused it, for the Bible said that nothing was permanent and everything came and went."

"I often wish I was asked more about the craft of the verse. I spent so many agonizing hours ensuring every line break was precise, every word and repetition chosen with care—because it was important to me to maintain the integrity of the lyric while also advancing the narrative. It’s that tightrope walk I’m studying in other people’s work and am continuously looking to understand further."

"I think I have a sense of how things need to sound, how to pull an audience in with tone, timing, and pacing. That affects a lot of my writing, too, being hyper aware of how an audience might read something. I want what’s happening on the page to mimic what my body would do on stage. A lot of that came out in the audiobook. I think I would have struggled to record the audiobook without having stage experience because it’s a lot of work to maintain that kind of performance voice."

"I try to tell the most authentic stories I can about womanhood and Dominican-ness and Afro-Dominican-ness/Afro-Latinidad that I can. Then I go back in and edit with the eye of who sets the table in this book, who gets left out, what am I saying, and what am I not saying right? I lean in or be more intentional about that. For me, it’s trying to be authentic and mindful of my own biases and questioning those while also just being incredibly truthful since truthfulness is inherently intersectional, right? I can’t not be woman and Black-descendant and culturally Latinx. Everything I write will have that in it."

"Part of it is finding your readers. Sometimes your readers don’t look like you, or come from your same background, but you get a sense of like, they know what I’m trying to do. They’re not telling me what they would do or telling me what their favorite poet would do. They’re telling me “Okay, based off the work you brought into this room, this is what I’m hearing.” That, to me, is such a generous way of reading because it’s reflecting back what you’re doing and you can figure out if it’s working or not. So, figure out who are your people…"

"people read like they eat: Sometimes we want comfort, sometimes we want to work to crack something open…Books truly are nourishment for me."

"(How do you distinguish Y.A. books from adult fiction?) Partly voice, but my own personal ethos is that Y.A. requires hope. I’m less stringent on my requirement for hope in books for adults."

"I don’t think writer’s block is real either…but I do think of it as a response to anxiety that oftentimes when we think [what] we have [is] writer’s block [but] what we may be grappling with is that we are uninspired, and that to make you have to also be taking in, and you have to be taking in at the same kind of level as you want to put out. And so if I’m working on a poetry collection it is helpful when I’m reading poetry or if I’m reading with a writer’s eye… Even if I’m not actively writing I’m always percolating, my brain is trying to make meaning and so I want to give it as much nutritious content as I can if that makes sense. And so I think the other thing we say when we say writer’s block is that we’re just stuck—we’re in the middle of something and maybe we don’t know where it goes or we don’t know how to finish the essay… and so we get anxious and tell ourselves we can’t, and I think both of those have an answer but it’s about figuring out what you’re actually dealing with. So, for me, I feel like writer’s block can often be an easy way to relieve yourself of having to do the work of what is it about creativity and this moment that I am stumbling over and how can I address it, right?"

"In a way, writing has always been lonely, that’s not really a new thing due to the pandemic per se, but it’s nice that it’s kind of forcing us—forcing you—to find ways to kind of work around that. It’s lonely I think in different ways because there’s the possibility of let’s meet up and write or let me go to an open mic and listen to other writers, and I think we’re finding new creative ways to create that community. Writing has always been lonely but everything else also feels lonely [now] and so to create communal relief somewhere—that felt so important."

"I feel like each book requires a different level of research. “The Poet X” was the most closely aligned with my own upbringing, and I know slam poetry [and] poetry styles pretty well, so it was less research for that book. “With the Fire on High” had a little bit more—she’s afro-Puerto Rican, it’s set in Philadelphia and it has to do with culinary school… so I had to dive in there. She’s also a teen parent."

"I didn’t personally have anyone in my family who passed on that crash, but I remember how it ruptured our understanding of each other at that moment—like who was on that flight (AA587 in 2001), what happened, is it terrorism? What does it mean when you lose almost 300 lives in two and a half minutes?"

"I’ve been lucky to travel to DR to the Mariposa Foundation and so speaking with the young women while I was doing workshops there as to their experience with an area that has a high percentage of sex tourism and also child prostitution and so the research sounds haphazard but it was really my trying to locate each character, their reality and make sure that all of this information doesn’t end up in the book that I had a very clear sense of the world that I am trying to write."

"I think I always go into a project imagining that I’m not going to pour too much of myself into it, and I think it helps that I write for teens, so there’s a distance there—between the kinds of things I’m dealing with versus the things you deal with when you’re 16 and there’s a lot of firsts still to encounter. But I do find that often at some point in the draft—perhaps halfway through—there are things that start coming up that are really things I’m dealing with."

"I think so often how people, particularly poets, begin first writing out of heartbreak, out of loss. Like I think most people’s early poems are because they are so emotional over something and this is the only form that feels safe, I can get it out on paper, at least that is how I remember writing and when I often encounter a young poet it is because of a thing that they are almost trying to exercise out of themselves and writing is the way to turn… and that does feel like creating from crisis."

"I also think of how often, when you’re first-generation, your parents don’t have the ability to self-actualize. They are working, or at least my parents were working to make sure there was food on the table, to make sure there was money they could send back to their own families… There wasn’t a lot of time for my mom to say I’m going to take care of myself and this is a practice and a thing i’m going to do outside of church...to be an immigrant in this country there’s a lot of uncertainty and instability you’re constantly dealing with"

"I think that one of the things I've noticed when I've spent time in the Dominican Republic, it's such a diaspora community in terms of who's in the U.S., that even when people feel really satisfied with what they're doing, there's still this desire to see what's in the U.S., what is happening in New York, like, what is this world we're always hearing about?"

"I don't imagine I'll ever write a book for young people that doesn't include an intergenerational theme — for me that was such a big part of growing up. And I think literature that is contemplating the family, you need the parents coming in and they can't be perfect. They can't, you know, save the day on their own."

"my own growth requires me to be able to forgive."

"It's hard to find stability when you're constantly rotating between the place you are and the place you're from."

"I was born and raised in this intersection between Harlem and Columbia University. Very much what felt like in-between worlds. But in a very Dominican immigrant Black community. My journey begins with my listening to my parents tell me stories, and with listening to bolero music and listening to hip hop. I wanted to write music long before I ever considered myself a poet or a writer…"

"But actually, it was teaching. I was an eighth grade English teacher, Prince George’s County, Maryland. I taught at a school that was 78 percent Latinx, almost 20 percent Black. They had never had an Afro-Latina teaching there at all. So here I am in this space where my students are so representative of the spaces I come from, and yet they had never seen a figure in front of them that reflected their background—and my students were struggling readers. So that was where the first kernel of “Maybe my writing is leading towards my offering something to these students.” That was where the idea of a novel first sprang up."

"Every one of my characters is Black. And every one of my characters wrestles with what that means. I’m trying to think about the many ways that people might come to terms with their race and identity and provide young women reading different blueprints. There are many ways you can be you and that you can exist in your Blackness. And here are some questions you might be wrestling with because I know that I’ve kind of sat in, “what do I call myself?”"

"What does it mean to say, “Alright, I can be Black and not be Black American and still be in solidarity with Black Americans.” Recognize perhaps we have similarities, but also, like in supporting you, you might have differences. You might have things that you have going on because you generationally lived in this country that I may not understand. So I can stand here and be like, “I am Black, too, but I will be quiet because right now, this is a different beat. I can learn here.”"

"this isn’t new. I think that’s my biggest thing, right? Negritude has been around. It has been a movement in Latin America for years, for decades. And we are finding the language and doing some deep dives, that also may complicate our understanding of our heritage."

"when it came to having conversations with editors, I felt really prepared to be like, “I want to know how many folks of color you’ve published. I want to know what their trajectories were. I want to know how you support second books.” Right. Not just this one book."

"I think having that longterm vision was helpful. But I want folks to just do the work. Right. Do the research. Information is out there. There’s a lot of ways to hustle even before you’ve been signed to anything."

"I’m still learning a lot. For me, it’s like, “Where could this be going?” Alright, let me do that work now."

"(What book should everybody read before the age of 21?) “The Poet X,” by Elizabeth Acevedo. It’s a stunning story told in verse about a young Dominican poet learning to use her voice and take up space. I think as we grow up and start to discover who we are, we also have to discover what we want to say. Then we have to get comfortable saying it. I think this is the kind of story that makes you feel strong when you’re reading it, and then you can lean on that strength when you need to use your voice and take up space in your real life."

"Elizabeth Acevedo is a national treasure. She does so many things well while being a lovely person. Read everything she writes."

"I was the first black woman editor at the New York Times Magazine – that’s crazy! I’m not that old where you’d think I could be the New York Times’ first anything, but I was… People wanted to know about things, they had questions about my hair, they wanted to know where I was from, they wanted to know if I only listen to hip-hop. When people aren’t exposed to difference, there’s a lot of burden put on you to explain…"

"Writing for TV was a huge influence on this book, partly because you realize in casting what a vast gap there was between who people are and who they play. You sometimes see Shakespearan trained actors playing janitors. And at the same time, I’ve seen actresses who are really well known for playing wealthy, super cultured women come in and they are well, let’s just say the exact opposite."

"I love that Camilla is trying to figure it out. We tell kids there are no stupid questions. But when you throw race in the mix, there are a lot of questions — some are painful to ask, some are painful to answer and we all say stupid things sometimes. I hope readers feel after reading Cammi’s story that it’s not about one moment or interaction, it’s about staying heart strong and moving forward. Like Maya Angelou used to say, when you know better, you do better."

"I think the essence of the book would really be, it doesn't hurt to try. You know, I think that's been my motto forever. And I think it's done me very well. And I think the joy in the book is a big thing, because I think we live a lot of our lives without joy. And I think loving what you're doing while you're doing it is really important."

"People say you’ve got to write honestly and that sounds great but also, what does that mean? I think part of that is knowing there are some things black people go through that are universal and those things are how the world shapes you…if you’re in a racist encounter, they’re not going to say, “Oh, you’re Jamaican, oh, you’re Nigerian; oh, you’re full African American; your ancestors were brought here on slave ships.” That’s not what other people see. In the outside world, we have a kind of universal experience but it also changes depending on whether you’ve grown up in predominantly white spaces or predominantly black spaces…"

"The thing is that underneath we are all humans…Everyone has people they love and people they want to protect, everyone has things they are afraid of or that cause them pain."

"I saw the opportunity to show the beauty in the culture and show that these words sound magical. We’re so used to using Latin, but if J.K. Rowling saw magic in that, you can see magic in your own culture. And if you can see it, you can help other people to see it."

"…I had a lot of different reasons for writing the book but at its core was the desire to write for black teenage girls growing up reading books they were absent from. That was my experience as a child. Children of Blood and Bone is a chance to address that. To say you are seen."

"(Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?) For novelists, I’m a forever-fan of Sabaa Tahir. Her debut fantasy — “An Ember in the Ashes” — was the epic tale that inspired me to write “Children of Blood and Bone.” It moved me in ways a story hadn’t moved me before and gave me a chance to imagine a fantasy world with characters I’d never gotten to see before. For journalists, Shaun King. The work Shaun does for the black community is incredible. I respect his strength, tenacity and passion, and I admire him deeply for the commitment to getting our stories out."

"When I read, I like to go somewhere else in my mind with stories that touch our real world without taking place in it."

"(What makes for a good fantasy novel?) I think the most magical fantasies will always be the ones with a world you want to live in forever…I think great worlds are important because they allow readers to play in that world with their imagination long after the book is done, but a great world isn’t complete without a great protagonist."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) Acts of love. Be it familial, friendly or romantic. A beautifully described, tender act of love destroys me…I’ve always loved sweeping romances and magical fantasies. I’ve loved headstrong, determined female protagonists and epic battles. I still like to read the same things. I think the difference now is that I get to read all the things I like with characters who look like me. My childhood stories didn’t give me that. Even in the stories I wrote myself, I was only writing white characters and biracial characters. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that erasure was painful and damaging to my sense of self. So getting to create and read stories that fight that erasure and build on my sense of self is the only significant change in my reading tastes."

"You have your duty and your heart. To chose one means the other must suffer."

"Love is too strong, too intense, for what I feel. For what I am allowed to feel."

"Power is not the answer. It will only intensify the fight."

"No matter how much I crave peace, the gods have other plans."

"“Everyone else feels like being caught in the rain. You’re the whole tsunami."

"I begin to realise how far others will go to keep us down."

"I don't know what shocks me more--- the power in my voice or the words themselves"

"Reality and logic don’t matter to her. She needs this so badly, failure isn’t even in the realm of possibilities."

"I’ve been a sheep. A sheep when my kingdom needed me to act like a king."

"It doesn't matter how strong I get, how much power my magic wields. They will always hate me in this world."

"It avoids rather than hurts, it hurts rather than maims, it maims rather than kills—the staff does not destroy.” “I teach you to be warriors in the garden so you will never be gardeners in the war. I give you the strength to fight, but you all must learn the strength of restraint.” Mama turns to me, shoulders pinned back. “You must protect those who can’t defend themselves. That is the way of the staff."

"Fool yourself all you want, little prince, but don’t feign innocence with me. I won’t let your father get away with what he’s done. I won’t let your ignorance silence my pain."

"Deep down, I know the truth. I knew it the moment I saw the maji of Ibadan in chains. The gods died with our magic."

"(Chapter One)"

"He wants to believe that playing by the monarchy’s rules will keep us safe, but nothing can protect us when those rules are rooted in hate"

"(Chapter Two )"

"You must protect those who can’t defend themselves. Mama Agba’s words from this morning seep into my head."

"(Chapter Five )"

"Yemi meets my eyes with a hatred that impales me like a sword. Though her mouth never opens, her voice rings in my skull. “Safe ended a long time ago.”"

"(Chapter Eleven)"

"I arch my eyebrow at Amari and think back to her mention of a training accident. I assumed the scar came from her brother’s sword, but was she holding a sword, too? Despite her escape from Lagos, I can’t imagine the princess locked in battle."

"(Chapter Thirteen)"

"Though the royal seal is etched into the clay wall, it waves in my mind like the velvet banners in Father’s throne room. After the Raid, he abolished the old seal, a gallant bull-horned lionare that always used to make me feel safe. Instead, he proclaimed that our power would be represented by the snow leopanaires: ryders who were ruthless. Pure."

"(Chapter Twenty-Two)"

"Growing up, Father led me to believe that those who clung to the myth of the gods were weak. They relied on beings they could never see, dedicating their lives to faceless entities."

"(Chapter Twenty-Four )"

"After I perform the ritual and bring magic back, after Baba is safe and sound. I’ll rally a group of Grounders to sink this monstrosity into the sand. That announcer will pay for every wasted divîner life. Every noble will answer for their crimes."

"(Chapter Twenty-Five )"

"I don’t know what disturbs me more: that I killed him, or that I could do it again. Strike, Amari. A thin whisper of father’s voice plays in my ears."

"(Chapter Thirty-Four)"

"Those are Father’s words, Inan. His decisions. Not yours. We are our own people. We make our own choices.”"

"(Chapter Thirty-Six )"

"Zélie’s memories don’t hold the villains Father always warned of. Only families he tore apart. Duty before self. His creed rings through my ears. My father. Her king. The harbinger of all this suffering."

"(Chapter Thirty-Nine)"

"This pawn was the only piece I managed to salvage. Shame ripples through me as I stare at the tarnished metal. The only gift he’s ever given me, and at its core is hate."

"(Chapter Forty-Seven)"

"Zu’s tears make my own eyes prickle. Kwame’s face pinches with pain. I want to hate him for what he did to Tzain, but I can’t. I’m no better. If anything, I’m worse. If Inan hadn’t stopped me, I would’ve stabbed that masked divîner to death just to get answers"

"(Chapter Fifty-One)"

"A pit of guilt opens in my chest, tainted with the smell of burning flesh. The fires I watched from the royal palace resurface, the innocent lives burned before my young eyes. A memory I’ve pushed down like my magic, a day I longed to forget. But staring at Zélie now brings it all back: the pain. The tears. The death."

"(Chapter Fifty-Four)"

"The children of Orïsha dance like there’s no tomorrow, each step praising the gods. Their mouths glorify the rapture of liberation, their hearts sing the Yoruba songs of freedom. My ears dance at the words of my language, words I once thought I’d never hear outside my head. They seem to light up the air with their delight. It’s like the whole world can breathe again."

"(Chapter Fifty-Six )"

"“I thought things could be different. I wanted them to be different. But after what we just saw, we have no choice. We can’t give people that kind of power.”"

"(Chapter Sixty-Three)"

"In that instant it hits me: Zulaikha’s death. Zélie’s screams. They don’t mean a thing to him. Because they’re maji, they’re nothing. He preaches duty before self, but his Orïsha doesn’t include them. It never has."

"(Chapter Sixty-Six )"

"Binta’s voice rings loud. The sight of her blood fills my head. I can avenge her now. I can cut Father down. While the maji take out the guards, my sword can free Father of his head. Retribution for all his massacres, every poor soul he ever killed […]."

"(Chapter Sixty-Eight )"

"The ache that cuts through me is sharper than the blade that cut through my back. It’s like losing Mama all over again."

"(Chapter Seventy-One)"

"I stare at the blade; the inscription gleams in the moonlight. Its words simplify my mission, creating space for my pain. A soldier. A great king. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. Duty over self. Orïsha over Zélie."

"(Chapter Seventy-Four )"

"I don’t want to be alone. Not when tonight could be my last night. Blind faith in the gods may have taken me this far, but if I’m going to get on that island tomorrow, I need more."

"(Chapter Seventy-Five)"

"Minutes stretch into hours, an eternity that drags like death. Each second that passes is another second my mind tumbles in guilt What if they’re captured? What if they die? I can’t have more people perish for this. I can’t have more blood stain my hands."

"(Chapter Seventy-Eight)"

"As I approach Inan, Baba’s shaking grows frantic. I can’t let him break my resolve. I don’t want them to win, Baba. But I can’t let you die."

"(Chapter Seventy-Nine )"

"As long as we don’t have magic, they will never treat us with respect, Baba’s spirit booms. They need to know we can hit them back. If they burn our homes—I burn theirs, too."

"(Chapter Eighty)"

"I cannot end it like this. If I do that, I’m no better than him. Orïsha will not survive by employing his tactics. Father must be taken down, but it is too much to drive my sword through his heart—Father pulls back his blade. Momentum carries me forward. Before I can pivot, Father swings his sword around and the blade rips across my back."

"(Chapter Eighty-Three)"

"Over generations, love of the maji turned into fear. Fear turned into hate. Hate transformed into violence, a desire to wipe the maji away.”"

"On earth, Sky Mother created humans, her children of blood and bone. In the heavens she gave birth to the gods and goddesses. Each would come to embody a different fragment of her soul.”"

"Magic slithers inside me. Venomous, like a thousand spiders crawling over my skin. It wants more of me.”"

"In death, the other spirits of the arena passed on their pain. Their hate. In their memories I felt the sting of the guards’ whips. I tasted the salt of fallen tears on my tongue. But Minoli brought me to the dirt fields of Minna, where she and her sharp-nosed siblings worked the land for autumn’s corn crop. Though the sun shone brutal and the work was hard, each moment passed with a smile, with song.”"

"It’s like seeing her for the first time: the human behind the maji. Fear embedded in the pain. Tragedy caused in Father’s name.”"

"Our lack of power and our oppression are one and the same, Inan. Without power we’re maggots. Without power the monarchy treats us like scum!”"

"For the first time since the torture, I feel a hint of the old fire that used to roar louder than my fear. But its flame is weak now; as soon as it flickers, it’s blown out by the wind.”"

"For years he forced Inan and me to trade blows and bruises under his watchful eye, never relenting, no matter how hard we cried. Every battle was a chance to correct his mistakes, to bring his first family back to life. If we got strong enough, no sword could take us down, no maji could burn our flesh. We fought for his approval, stuck in a battle for his love neither of us would ever win. We raised our swords against each other because neither of us had the courage to raise one against him.”"

"The moment magic breathes under my skin, I can’t find my voice. The purple light of my ashê glows around my hands, the divine power that fuels our sacred gifts. I haven’t felt its heat since the ritual that brought magic back to Orïsha. Since Baba’s spirit tore through my veins."

"“I can’t be expected to carry the plight of my people forever.”"

"(Chapter Two)"

"I tuck away my white streak, wishing I could just chop the lock from my hair. Tzain may not notice the way Zélie looks at it, but I always catch the snarl it brings to her face. For so long, she had to suffer because of her gift. Now those that hurt her the most wield that magic themselves."

"(Chapter Four)"

"But the return of magic and the birth of tîtáns are living proof that we are finally returning to the Orïsha the gods have always wanted for us! We’re so full of hatred and fear, we’ve forgotten what blessings these abilities are. For centuries these powers have been the source of our strife, but the gods ordained us with magic so the people of Orïsha could thrive!”"

"(Chapter Six)"

"For so long we’ve been defenseless against the havoc the maji wreak, but now the gods have blessed us as well. We’re powerful enough to annihilate them, Inan. The only way to achieve lasting peace is to cleanse the maggots from this land.”"

"(Chapter Twenty-Three)"

"Yoruba is sacred to our people. It’s not just something you can learn.”"

"Do you accept these people as your own?"

"These rebels burned your city to the ground. They wanted you and your people to starve. They are the poison of Orïsha! If you do not cut off the hand now, eventually you will be forced to sever the entire limb.”"

"(Chapter Twenty-Seven )"

"Even before Mother interrupted my rally, the support of the Orïshans didn’t touch the boundless joy of these maji. I wonder what it would be like to be embraced like that. To actually have a place where you belong."

"(Chapter Twenty-Eight )"

"If you’re going to be an elder, you need to understand that true magic isn’t about power,” I explain. “It’s something that’s a part of us, something that’s literally in our blood. Our people have suffered for this. Died for this. It’s not something you can just learn. You may have helped us get it back, but right now we’re still being hunted and killed for the very magic tîtáns like you use against us.”"

"(Chapter Thirty )"

"After the Raid, practicing these incantations was the only part of him I had left.”"

"Everyone, fill the bags with as many scrolls as you can. Kenyon, burn the rest.”"

"(Chapter Thirty-Eight )"

"No!” I jerk up, wincing at the pain that shoots up my side. “This temple may be the oldest Orïsha has. It holds the stories of our past!”"

"(Chapter Forty-Two )"

"My chest falls as Mother marches forward with her tîtáns that still stand. As she walks past the carnage in her path, I know she’s right. Our enemies are gaining ground. We need to eliminate every asset they have. But how long can both sides keep going like this before we destroy Orïsha?"

"I do not think you’ve gone far enough,” she says. “You speak of this war as if it is the start, but the maji and the monarchy have been fighting for decades. Centuries. Both sides have inflicted great pain on each other. Both sides are filled with mistrust.” [...] “You cannot blame Zélie for her actions any more than you can blame Inan for his past mistakes. You have to look beyond the surface if you truly want to achieve the peace you seek.”"

"(Chapter Forty-Five)"

"All these years I thought Father was a monster, but what if ruling this kingdom forced him to act that way?"

"(Chapter Fifty-Nine)"

"This war didn’t start when magic came back, Inan. You are only seeing the end of a battle countless have given their lives for. By winter’s dawn, we will have wiped the scourge of maji from this land. Even your wretched father couldn’t achieve that.”"

"(Chapter Sixty-Four)"

"No one ever asks, but you’re here. You’re here when so many people aren’t!” Roën grabs his head as if he could pull out his hair. “You survived the Raid. The guards. You survived the wrath of a king. You’re not a victim, Zélie. You’re a survivor! Stop running away!”"

"(Chapter Sixty-Nine)"

"I look back, not recognizing the monster that wears Ojore’s face. We did this to him. We poisoned him with all our hate."

"Even from afar, I see the blackened corpses that lie in the streets. Corpses that lie there because of me."

"(Chapter Seventy-Six)*Even from afar, I see the blackened corpses that lie in the streets. Corpses that lie there because of me."

"I feel the most sacred gift of Oya beneath my hands, the holy magic of life and death. When the last body breathes again, I stare at the glowing tattoos on my hands."

"(Chapter Eighty-One)"

"Strike, Amari."

"“I see the truth now. We pretend that magic is the root of our pain when everything rotten in this kingdom begins and ends with us. There’s no helping it.” I clench my fist. “Amari proved that in Ibadan. This throne corrupts even the purest of hearts. As long as it exists, people will continue to tear this kingdom apart.”"

"(Chapter Eighty-Five )"

"In all my novels… I deal with the many problems and prejudices which exist for Black people in Britain today."

"I believe it is important to speak to your readers in person... to enable people to have a whole picture of me; I have to both write and speak. I view my role as a writer and also as an oral communicator."

"I work toward the liberation of women but I'm not a feminist. I'm just a woman."

"Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us."

"But who made the law that we should not hope in our daughters? We, women, subscribe to that law more than anyone. Until we change all this, it is still a man's world, which women will always help to build.”"

"Few things are as bad as a guilty conscience."

"Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There’s nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world – like we are called the Third World."

"The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I’d done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn’t read it."

"I am a woman and a woman of Africa. I am a daughter of Nigeria and if she is in shame, I shall stay and mourn with her in shame."

"When has it ever been a virtue to be rich in wealth and poor in people?' The relatives nodded. They understood her very well- why have heaven an earth when you have no one to share it with?"

"1975 was International Women's Year. I had never heard the word 'feminism' before then. I was writing my books from the experiences of my own life and from watching and studying the lives of those around me in general. I did not know that writing the way I was, was putting me into a special category."

"Writers simply have to write, and not worry so much about what people think, because public opinion is such a difficult horse to ride."

"Living entirely off writing is a precarious existence and money is always short, bit with careful management and planning I found I could keep my head and those of my family, through God's grace, above water."

"Relatives watching wanted and expected me to break down and cry, thereby devaluing my inner sorrow."

"When people are not educated enough for the job market, it is like a time bomb ticking away which could explode in the streets."

"I thought at one time I would be thrown out. But I was not."

"An uneducated person has little chance of happiness."

"I want to leave my boring job because I want to write, because I want to catch up with goings on in the theatre, because I want to travel and because I want to be with my family."

"The uneducated man has no such choices. Once he has lost his boring job, he feels he's lost his life. That is unfair."

"God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody’s appendage? she prayed desperately."

"In Ibuza sons help their father more than they help their mother. A mother's joy is only in the name. She worries over them, looks after them when they are small; but in the actual help on the farm, the upholding of the family name, all belong to the father."

"God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody's appendage? ... when will I be free?"

"Nnu Ego was like those not-so well-informed Christians who,promised the Kingdom of Heaven,believed that it was literally just round the corner and that Jesus Christ was coming on the very morrow. Many of them would hardly contribute anything ton this world,reasoning, "What is the use? Christ will come soon" They became so insulated in their beliefs that not only would they have little to do with ordinary sinners,people going about their daily work, they even pitied them and in many cases looked down on them because the Kingdom of God was not for the likes of them. Maybe this was a protective mechanism devised to save them from realities too painful to accept."

"Nnaife did not realise that Dr Meers's laughter was inspired by that type of wickedness that reduces any man, white or black, intelligent or not, to a new low; lower than the basest of animals, for animals at least respected each other's feelings, each other's dignity."

"On her way back to their room, it occurred to Nnu Ego that she was a prisoner, imprisoned by her love for her children, imprisoned by her role as the senior wife. She was not even expected to demand more money for her family; that was considered below the standard expected of a woman in her position. It was not fair, she felt, the way men cleverly used a woman’s sense of responsability to actually enslave her. They knew that the traditional wife like herself would never dream of leaving her children.”"

"A man is never ugly."

"Don't blame anyone for what has happened to your father. Things have changed drastically since the days of his own youth,but he has refused to see the changes...The fact is that parents get only reflected glory from their children nowadays,whereas your father has invested in all of you, just as his father invested in him so that he could help on the farm. Your father forgot that he himself left the family farm to come to this place."

"Every woman should be free to live the life she chooses."

"The fear of everybody was that the man might give in and say, "After all, it's her life." However a thing like that is not permitted in Nigeria; you are simply not allowed to commit suicide in peace, because everyone is responsible for the other person. Foreigners may call us a nation of busybodies, but to us, an individual's life belongs to the community and not just to him or her."

"Yet the more I think about it the more I realise that we women set impossible standards for ourselves."

"I cannot live up to your standards."

"Some parents, especially those who have many children from different wives, may reject a bad son, a master may reject a wicked servant, a wife may go so far as to abandon a bad husband, but a mother can never, never reject her son. If he is convicted, she will be condemned alongside him."

"The more I think about it, the more I realize that we, women, set impossible models for ourselves. That we make life intolerable for each other. I can't live up to our role models, older wife. That’s why I need to create my own."

"At home in Nigeria, all a mother had to do for a baby was wash and feed him and, if he was fidgety, strap him onto her back and carry on with her work while that baby slept."

"The leaves were still on the trees but were becoming dry, perched like birds ready to fly off."

"Dreams soon assume substance"

"Adah could not stop thinking about her discovery that the whites were just as fallible as everyone else. There were bad whites and good whites, just as there were bad blacks and good blacks! Why then did they claim to be superior?"

"She did not delude herself into expecting Francis to love her. He had never been taught how to love, but had an arresting way of looking pleased at Adah's achievements."

"One thing she did know was the greatest book on human psychology is the Bible. If you were lazy and did not wish to work, or if you had failed to make your way in society, you could always say, 'My kingdom is not of this world.' If you were a jet-set woman who believed in sleeping around, VD or no VD, you could always say Mary Magdalene had no husband, but didn't she wash the feet of Our Lord? Wasn't she the first person to see our risen saviour? If, in the other hand, you believed in the inferiority of the blacks, you could always say, 'Slaves, obey your masters.' It is a mysterious book, one of the greatest of all books, if not the greatest. Hasn't it got all the answers?"

"Marriage is lovely when it works, but if it does not, should one condemn oneself ? I stopped feeling guilty for being me."

"She had gambled with marriage, just like most people, but she had gambled unluckily and had lost."

"The concept of whiteness could cover a multitude of sins."

"Typical Igbo psychology; men never do wrong, only the women; they have to beg for forgiveness, because they are bought, paid for and must remain like that, silent, obedient slaves."

"She, who only a few months previously would have accepted nothing but the best, had by now been conditioned to expect inferior things. She was now learning to suspect anything beautiful and pure. Those things were for the whites, not the blacks."

"You must know, my dear young lady, that in Lagos you may be a million publicity officers for the Americans; you may be earning a million pounds a day; you may have hundreds of servants: you may be living like an elite, but the day you land in England, you are a second-class citizen.”"

"(Francis, p. 39)"

"(Narrator, p. 53)"

"Did she not feel totally fulfilled when she had completed the manuscript, just as if it were another baby she had had?"

"(Narrator, p. 166)"

"Her children were going to be different. They were all going to be black, they were going to enjoy being black, be proud of being black, a black of a different breed."

"(Narrator, p. 141)"

"London, having killed Adah's congregational God, created instead a personal God who loomed large and really alive."

"(Narrator, p. 151)"

"They were going to get the room they were asking for. Pa Noble was too old for Sue."

"(Narrator, p. 93)"

"Hunger drove Francis to work as a clerical officer in the post office. Adah's hopes rose. This might save the marriage after all."

"(Narrator, p. 162)"

"This old friend of Adah's paid for the taxi that took her home from Camden Town because he thought she was still with her husband."

"(Narrator, p. 175)"

"Then the thought suddenly struck her. Yes, she would go to school."

"(Narrator, p. 9)"

"So, sorry as she was for making a fool out of an old doctor, this was just one of the cases where honesty would not have been the best policy."

"(Narrator, p. 42)"

"In Ibuza, every young man was entitled to his fun. The blame usually went to the girls. A girl who had had adventures before marriage was never respected in her new home; everyone in the village would know about her past, especially if she was unfortunate enough to be married to an egocentric man."

"There were men who would go about raping young virgins of thirteen and fourteen, and still expect the women they married to be as chaste as flower buds."

"Anything imported was considered to be much better than their own old ways."

"It is so even today in Nigeria: when you have lost your father, you have lost your parents. Your mother is only a woman, and women are supposed to be boneless. A fatherless family is a family without a head, a family without shelter, a family without parents, in fact a non-existing family. Such traditions do not change very much."

"Every woman, whether slave or free, must marry. All her life a woman always belonged to some male. At birth you were owned by your people, and when you were sold you belonged to a new master, when you grew up your new master who had paid something for you would control you."

"On each cheek was drawn the outline of a large spinach leaf looking ready to be picked. It was not that many Ibos would have put so many on the face of a little girl. But Ojebeta's mother Umeadi, when she realised that her daughter was going to live, had had reason for going to the expense of engaging the services of the most costly face-maker in Ibuza. For, with such a riot of tribal spinach marks on her only daughter's face, no kidnapper would dream of selling her into slavery. What was more, if she got lost her people would always know her."

"My mistress had taught me the precepts of God’s Word: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.” But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor."

"I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? He was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach…"

"When my grandmother applied for him for payment he said the estate was insolvent, and the law prohibited payment. It did not, however, prohibit him from retaining the silver candelabra, which had been purchased with that money. I presume they will be handed down in the family, from generation to generation."

"But to the slave mother New Year’s day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns. She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from her childhood; but she has a mother’s instincts, and is capable of a mother’s agonies."

"For my master, whose restless, craving, vicious nature roved about day and night, seeking whom to devour, had just left me, with stinging, scorching words; words that scathed ear and brain like fire. O, how I despised him! I thought how glad I should be if some day when he walked the earth, it would open and swallow him up…"

"He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of…But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him … He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things."

"If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave. I know that some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but many slaves feel it most acutely, and shrink from the memory of it."

"She felt that her marriage vows were desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she had no compassion for the poor victim of her husband’s perfidy. She pitied herself as a martyr; but she was incapable of feeling for the condition of shame and misery in which her unfortunate, helpless slave was placed."

"The young wife soon learns that the husband in whose hands she has placed her happiness pays no regard to his marriage vows. Children of every shade of complexion play with her own fair babies, and too well she knows that they are born unto him of his own household. Jealousy and hatred enter the flowery home, and it is ravaged of its loveliness."

"Some poor creatures have been so brutalized by the lash that they will sneak out of the way to give their masters free access to their wives and daughters. Do you think this proves the black man to belong to an inferior order of beings? What would you be, if you had been born and brought up a slave…"

"I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched."

"But O, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from childhood, who have been free to choose the objects of your affection, whose homes are protected by law, do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely! If slavery had been abolished I too could have married the man of my choice; I could have had a home shielded by the laws…"

"You must forsake your sinful ways, and be faithful servants. Obey your old master and your young master…if you disobey your earthly master, you offend your heavenly Master. You must obey God’s commandments."

"Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own."

"We knelt down together, with my child pressed to my heart, and my other arm round the faithful, loving old friend I was about to leave forever. On no other occasion has it ever been my lot to listen to so fervent a supplication for mercy and protection. It thrilled through my heart, and inspired me with trust in God."

"Yet that intelligent, enterprising, noble-hearted man was a chattel! Liable, by the laws of a country that calls itself civilized, to be sold with horses and pigs!"

"I replied, “God alone knows how much I have suffered; and He, I trust, will forgive me. If I am permitted to have my children, I intend to be a good mother, and to live in such a manner that people cannot treat me with contempt."

"I did not discover till years afterward that Mr. Thorne’s intemperance was not the only annoyance she suffered from…he had poured vile language into the ears of [Grandmother’s] innocent great-grandchild."

"I thought that if he was my own father, he ought to love me. I was a little girl then, and didn’t know any better. But now I never think any thing about my father. All my love is for you."

"Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage….The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own."

"And later he burnt the book and I think by that time this urge to write had become more important to me than he realized, and that was the day I said, ‘I’m going to leave this marriage’ and he said “What for, that stupid book?’ and I said, “I just feel you just burned my child."

"I write about the little happenings of everyday life . Being a woman and African born, I see things through an African woman’s eyes. I chronicle the little happenings in the lives of the African women I know. I did not know that by doing so I was going to be called feminist."

"It is like having double vision. We see the world that white people see but we are also seeing a mythic landscape at the same time and an historic landscape. White people see Rotary parks and headlands, we see sacred sites."

"I am not writing to make people feel warm and comfortable. When my readers enter the world of my book I want them to feel like they can find a place to belong in my story. But it is not their story, and the language is familiar but it is not their language. It is a novel about belonging and it is a novel about difference, too.'"

"Aboriginal lore is vast and it is inclusive. Bitterness comes from loss of culture and loss of lore. And we have lost those things to some degree. But if you actually understand the old culture then you understand that we are all in it together."

"This bloody bullshit about the forgotten white working class – if there’s any forgotten people in Australia, if there’s any battlers in Australia, it’s brown and black people."

"I compare Bri and Starr to Biggie and Tupac…Without the beef! Tupac was very community-orientated, and that’s how Starr is. But Bri, similar to Biggie, she’s about making it, she’s about seeing her dreams come to life. She’s about trying to save her family, and there’s nothing wrong with that. So that’s where they’re different, but they’re similar in the fact that they are both powerful young women who know they have voices, and they both understand how they can use those voices to affect an entire generation."

"If nothing else, fiction has empowered a lot of people in the act of resistance. The Hate U Give, I know, has birthed several young activists and I’m so happy with that, I’m so proud these young people have decided to speak up and speak out on things that concern them. There was one young lady in Texas, it started out with her deciding she was going to speak up for the book when it was challenged by the school district. And that led to her becoming an activist in her own right in other areas. So I think books can empower. Rudine Sims Bishop [the author and educator] says that books are either mirrors, windows or sliding-glass doors, and that’s important in the act of resistance. You need that mirror to see yourself, to know what you can be and know what you are. And then you need that window to see into someone else’s life so you can understand what’s happening around you in the world that you may not notice at first glance. And you need the sliding-glass door so that you can step into someone else’s life and walk in with some empathy and use that empathy to make yourself heard. So yeah, I think books play a huge role in resistance. They play a huge role in opening people’s eyes and they’re a form of activism in their own right, in the fact that they do empower people and show others the lives of people who may not be like themselves.""

"I'm okay with people saying “oh the language makes me uncomfortable,” but if the language is what makes you uncomfortable, consider yourself privileged. I'm more uncomfortable about the killing of unarmed black people in this country."

"Teenagers give me hope. We write them off so often. But I'm seeing a lot of things in this generation that’s coming up that gives me a lot of hope for the future. So I tell them when I'm in the old folks home, I think I can relax because I think you guys are going to do a great job."

"So many black kids are put in that position, so I wanted to show that there is no one way to talk black. There is a stereotype that if you sound ghetto, and you use a lot of slang, that makes you black. I wanted to show this girl who exists in these two different worlds. Which Starr is the real Starr? There are so many adults who identify with that, too. I went through it myself when I was in college…"

"I realized the more specific the story, the more universal it becomes."

"The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South. And the town we lived in - Nicholtown, which was a small community within Greenville, S.C. - was an all-black community. And people still lived very segregated lives, I think, because that was all they had always known. And there was still this kind of danger to integrating. So people kind of stayed in the places - the safe places that they had always known."

"I think what happened was the language settled in me much deeper than it settled into people who just can read something once and absorb what they absorb of it. I feel like what I was absorbing was not by any means superficial. And I think I was - from a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for this deep understanding of the literature not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page…"

"I feel like, as a person of color, I’ve always been kind of doing the work against the tide…I feel like change is coming, and change sometimes comes too slow for a lot of us. But it comes."

"I want it to be there for the people who need it. I don’t want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again."

"I think that when you’re a teen, you can be overwhelmed with change. You’re expected to be ready for adulthood, to know what you want to do with the rest of your life, to have mature relationships. But it’s only been like 2.5 years since you had braces, or got your period, or stopped playing with Barbies! So I think it’s easy to retreat into apathy and fear and to not try. Because trying means you can fail and be embarrassed—and those are two things that are literally the worst when you’re in high school…"

"The character doesn’t have to be exactly like them, but as an author you have to give something to the reader that shows the vulnerability and where the character’s coming from…You can have characters do awful things, but you make them relatable or have some kind of backstory that makes their actions, even if it’s not excusable, understandable…"

"I don’t think California is perfect by any means. I’m sure there are a lot of people being oppressed here and not getting a fair shake. But I just feel like maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s the location on the coast with access to all of Asia coming in and the strong immigrant communities here, that makes it different…I feel like in the East Coast, that’s still a thing in certain classes. That said, there are a lot of wealthy people here in California. There’s definitely segregation and classes in Los Angeles…"

"There are so many stories to tell — we’re just as varied in experiences as white men, and it doesn’t look like people are sick of those stories yet. And I’m lucky enough to be in a position to tell these stories and share them."

"I think there are a lot of gay men out there who are gay men as a consolation prize because they couldn't be women. That was certainly true of me."

"I just wanted to get f****d like a woman. That's what it's about. It’s not about what hole it's going in."

"The publishing world tends to focus more on the “young”, less on the “adult”. But I spend lots of time with teenagers and they’re truly the broadband generation. They’ve been online all their lives and seen things that would make milk curdle: beheadings, graphic violence, hardcore porn. Shielding them is never going to work. What makes this book YA is that it tackles issues in a non-judgmental way. We know these things exist, so let’s talk about them…"

"I was desperate to write a trans character for whom it wasn’t really an issue. After you come out, after the initial makeover and being on hormones for a few years, what happens next? That’s a story nobody tells…"

"Brands have to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to diversity…Don’t hire a black woman or a trans woman or a disabled woman and then get cross if they have opinions about their colour or their gender or their disability. The danger is if you’re hired just to be pretty but then you start having opinions about abortion, then you’re gonna get dropped. And of course you should be able to do both."

"Ever since my first novel, people have had quite a snippy vibe about YA, and it’s almost like: ‘Do you think one day you’ll write a real book?’…"

"My view is that despite the law being very clear, actually, a few very determined transphobes have crawled their way to the heart of the law like maggots in an apple."

"Look, I can't speak for all trans women, but I just want to live my life the way I always imagined it. I have become the version of myself I wanted to be when I was four."

"I have the same choices over my life and body that I would want for every single person on earth. I’m not trying to make a statement about what a woman is, I just want to be one. I don't really care if someone thinks that is biologically impossible; I've got near enough to be wholly satisfied. I am happy."

"…I can’t get away from violence and gore. Every fantasy I write will be dark, and disturbing in places. That’s what I like in my fantasy."

"…You might think it’s harder to come up with something from the ground up. And funnily enough, real-life settings seem to have their mystical way of kind of…working out. If you need an alley for something to happen and you’re thinking of a particular place, strangely enough, you usually find it. You usually find something workable that you can do. There’s a little less pressure, I will say, having made up something, versus trying to do justice to the place that actually exists."

"…Knowing the end. Knowing the rest. I like unanswered questions, and I don’t really believe in endings…"

"…Short stories still require a similar amount of lead-up time (sometimes they spend several years in my head) but once I sit down to write I finish within a few days, and have never needed to redraft or heavily revise. I love short stories. They are perfect, crystallized moments. Snapshots of life…"

"When I started writing, it was a way to understand my own adolescence, and what came out was a revelation about my own teenage years..."

"Nonfiction is supposed to drive home a point. In fiction, you need more nuance, buried in layers. There is character development and plot, and that switch can be tricky. I really like writing short stories, and I wish they were more popular..."

"Nonreaders. Especially Nonreaders of Color. Which I didn’t even realize until so many of them started contacting me. I write for them because I think it’s important to read, and yet I also understand that when you’ve never really seen yourself if the type of stuff you’re assigned, reading seems kinda wack [sic]. So I wanna hook the reluctants and get them started reading for enjoyment.…"

"The dialogue. I love writing dialogue and using that particular element of narrative to draw out the heart of a story because storytelling as a discipline really began with speech—stories orally passed down, generation to generation. Dialogue is just my most favorite thing. In all the stuff I’ve written actually."

"Taking time to color in the people around your main characters truly does a lot of heavy lifting for you in terms of subtext and context because tiny misunderstandings and micro-aggressions or avoidance speaks volumes without requiring so much exposition…"

"The thing about sexual assault and the narrative that gets played out so often is that it’s a deadlock. It’s what one person said vs. what another person said. It’s just that my personal experience as a survivor is incredibly muddied. I was very young and had such a crush on the person. I willingly obliged so many preambles to The Moment. I felt incredibly complicit. My self-gaslighting was so sustained and calcified that I wasn’t entirely sure if it “counted.” At the time it wasn’t something I would ever have felt secure declaring as assault if the burden of proof lay with me recounting everything about my intentions vs. the other person’s. We talk about consent and it’s important to define, but it’s never this hard and fast yes/no pact that’s then committed to the stenographer…"

"Sometimes there’s nothing better in the world than talking to another creative person about where you are, because you may feel like you’re floating in outer space a lot of the time."

"It doesn’t get any less scary. All that happens is that you have less life left. It helps if you do your falling early, and it really helps if you do your reaching early."

"This negation of our existence, and the omitting of our stories and histories, is one of the reasons I write — I write to exist. We cannot escape our past; our past determines what choices we make for the future. It determines how we act, how we see ourselves…"

"It’s easier for me to point out what makes bad literature: forced language, too much description, poor word choice, writing things just for shock value, shitty plots, clichés, lack of research, lazy writing, people who are trying to write “diversely” for the sake of diversity. Good literature is the opposite of that…"

"It is an American story. And it’s a Mexican story. I’m the child of immigrants. Being the child of immigrants is always this liminal space of, where do I fit in? It is complex. And the older I get, the more complex it becomes. I was born here. What I celebrate is the America that I grew up in—it’s very brown, it’s very Mexican…"

"Living on the hyphen is a complex cultural existence at times, and we’re often pulled in many directions where allegiance is always demanded. It is a fractured state of being, though I don’t think it’s necessarily bad; at least the having multiple ways of looking at life-the Mexican and American/the male and female. Where that goes awry is when we want to make one way of approaching life, The One Way. That’s where things begin to disintegrate, loyalties are questioned, and patriarchies are born…"

"More recent writers who have knocked me dead include Roberto Bolaño, Ruth Ozeki, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Isabel Quintero and N. K. Jemisin."

"It totally matters to me that teenagers think I'm cool. I mean, teens keep their fingers on the pulse of culture. When things shift, it's usually because they shift them. They call the shots. So if teenagers think I'm cool, then hopefully they'll want to get down with whatever I'm doing. My hope is that reading and writing becomes the new "waiting in line to buy Jordans.""

"I’m proud of young black america. I’m proud of them, even if they are misunderstood. I’m proud of them for using their voices, their way. Racism, classism, fear, it all exists. Still. It’s here, embedded into the fibers of our society. But I have to be honest, I do believe that because of technology, no matter how problematic it can be, and the rapid spreading of information, I’d like to believe there is a slow awakening occurring, and that our babies, or at least the generation after them will have a very different reality here. I know my role is to do what so many have done before me in this tradition — tell the stories, unashamed and unafraid."

"Hip-hop saved me,. It gave me permission to use language in a certain way. It validated my community and my friends. It gave our slang a certain elegance. I have a chip on my shoulder I pet every morning, a constant feeling like I have something to prove. Hearing that the canon can’t be diversified, there’s no room for more brown faces—that fueled my fire. I loved music that people said was not music, that it was too violent, too crass, too sexual. And now everyone in the world is rapping Hamilton."

"It's hard to be what you can't see."

"The truths are universal: Every kid knows fear. Every kid knows family and friendship. Loss, love, laughter. Everything else is just detail."

"My uncle used to say that the good books begin with “… and shots rang out.” Shots rang out is a cliché, but what he meant is that no one has time for you to get us to the minefield. Drop us in the midfield in the beginning. Drop us off in the mix and you can move backward and forward from there. End in the mix. Don’t answer any questions. Leave me in the muck at the end, too. There can be less muck, but all the loose ends shouldn’t be tied up. There should be something unreconciled. That’s life. Nobody’s life is tied up in a bow. Stories that end in a bow are kind of disrespectful to the reader. If you want your story to be compelling, let it fade to black without reconciliation."

"…And I just remember the pain – the pain of the lost friend but also the pain of meeting a part of myself that I didn’t know existed. A part of myself that could lose control to the point where I could commit a murder. That’s a very human thing. I think that most of us don’t ever meet that part of ourselves that exists within all of us. This rage that, when triggered, will cause you to do things that you don’t necessarily understand that you’re doing."

"…Young people – especially young men – it’s not that they hate reading, it’s that they hate boredom. So my thing was: I need to write a story that is interesting, that is gripping, that can connect to them and their experiences, and write something that’s not very intimidating, because there’s so much white space."

"I don't expect it to be easy, but I'm certain it will be fruitful. My mission is to take a different approach: Instead of explicitly encouraging young people to read, my goal is to get them to see the value in their own narratives — that they, too, have a story, and that there's power not just in telling it, but in the opportunity to do so."

"I get to whisper to them, "I love you, I see you, I know. I know you're scared, and it's OK to be scared, and if you can't be scared out there you can be scared in here. Within the pages of this book, you can be who you wholly are." And perhaps that might be empowering enough to at least add a bit of significance to their lives."

"People are like, "Well it's not standard English." So what? Standard English is for standard people."

"Who else is there to write for, as far as I’m concerned. I’d rather go ahead and tap into these kids, who still are malleable, but who also have insight into things that we don’t know, with vision that we no longer have; who have imaginations that have already been zapped from us."

"I love these kids. I’m just here to bear witness to their lives, because I believe that it is in bearing witness that everything is made real."

"A great writer in the purest sense...makes my head bop from side to side."

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."

"Little did I know — I mean the "choose kind" quote was not mine. It's one that I heard a couple years ago, by [author and motivational speaker] Wayne Dyer, and I put it in there because I think it's such a beautiful quote, and it's so true. And it's something that really resonates with kids, because they kind of get it right away. You know, sometimes because especially at that age, you're in an argument with a friend and you know you're right, [but] you need reminding that ultimately the important thing is to choose to be kind, not choose to be right."

"Given a chance, most children will do the right thing. I was hoping to make them aware that sometimes all it takes is a nice word to really make someone else’s day. Consequently, a thoughtless remark can really hurt someone’s feelings."

"If you tell stories about a really cool kid that you can relate to, and then you hear about kids being mean to that kid, then you feel what it is like to walk in his shoes. And you think, that is not right. I think the best way to write is to want to build empathy for your characters. You want the readers to feel the things they are feeling."

"I think the “young adult” age is such a critical period of our lives. Young adults are still young enough to dream of magic and possibility, yet old enough to think for themselves and to begin to make real change in the world."

"It might feel safer to stay hidden away, but safer is not always better. We all have things to say. Learning how to speak up helps us feel valued and a part of the community. And by honing our voices, we can change the world."

"I just did not feel like there were any Asian women out there who I could identify with…I thought it was our role to be quiet and that people would look down on me if I ever spoke out."

"My parents never overtly pushed us to marry Chinese (in fact, my dad was an equal opportunity dater in his time). However, they always encouraged us to value our Chinese-ness. It was never something to be ashamed of. I grew up in a very Chinese American household; Mom cooked Chinese food almost every night, yet she loved her French cooking classes. We all played multiple classical instruments, but were also avid Broadway fans."

"Kaz, this whole "shoot me" thing is starting to concern me."

"No mourners. No funerals."

"Wanden olstrum end kendesorum. Isen ne bejstrum."

"My biggest problem in these ACA debates? I don't know how to explain to you why you should care about other people."

"Kids are kids. No matter what year it is, no matter what language they speak or culture they’re in. There is something deeply universal about being a teenager, and I try to capture that universality in the things that I write."

"I’ve never really defined myself by a single identity—and in these times where identity means so much, I sometimes feel like I’m a bit of an outsider to every identity. Perhaps that makes me uniquely suited to writing about teens, who often feel on the outside"

"At that age, Alice had grasped the idea that some things in books were real, and others were not."

"After the cousins came the accountants, who were more open in their appraisals and didn’t bother with Alice at all, and after the accountants, like a Biblical plague building up to a big finish, came the lawyers."

"He was, of course, cheating her, that was what lawyers were for."

"But—though she was not an expert on cats—she was fairly certain that they did not, as a rule, snicker."

"“Patience, my friend.” “I’m not your friend. And I’m not patient.”"

"Some things are more important than following the rules. Aren’t they?"

"In desperation, she slid her fingers in the cracks between blocks, looking for some kind of catch or hidden mechanism. Which was ridiculous, she thought, because how complicated could a secret door be if a cat figured it out?"

"“You’re a cat,” she said automatically. “Your powers of perception are astounding,” the cat drawled. “Although I feel obliged to point out, in the interests of ontological exactitude, that I am in fact only half cat. Personally, though, I have always considered it the better half.”"

"“What do you see here?” “Books?” “Indeed, books. They are the ocean in which magic swims.”"

"Magic, you’ll find, is nine parts dull to one part excitement, and the exciting bits usually hurt like the blazes."

"“I still say they’re creepy,” Ashes said. “I don’t think you get to decide what’s creepy,” Alice said. “You’re a talking cat. You’re creepy. This whole place is creepy.”"

"The sum total of Alice’s medical knowledge was that blood was supposed to stay on the inside."

"“When you’re as old as I am,” Ending said, “one’s nature is largely a product of habit.”"

"But it’s not justice that they’re mostly concerned with, it’s division of the loot."

"“But didn’t that hurt?” Dex shrugged. “Pain is an illusion. The body is only a clay vessel holding the immortal essence of the soul, so it is a mistake to attach any import to the difficulties it may encounter. In fact, the whole episode reinforced my fundamental understanding of—“ She caught Alice’s expression. “Yes. It hurt quite a lot.”"

"“Well?” the cat said. “Are we going to walk all the way there?” “You’re going to get fat if you keep being so lazy.” “You say that like it’s a bad thing. For cats, being fat that just means that you’re winning.”"

"The more he didn’t know, she reasoned, the easier he would be to fool."

"I must say, you are the least unintelligent human I have ever met."

"Of course, where magic is involved, appearances don’t mean much."

"“We’re doomed,” one of the sprites said, turning wildly in a circle as though excited at the prospect. “Doomed! Doomed!”"

"“You’re mad,” he said. “You’ve gone mad. There’s no two ways about it.” “Your mother was the one who helped me,” Alice said. “Then she’s gone mad too.”"

"“You know, you could be a bit more constructive,” Alice said. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around the magnitude of your insanity,” the cat muttered. “Once I’ve got that handled, I’ll get started on the mind-numbing terror.”"

"“You’re not very loyal,” Isaac said as Alice took his hand. “Loyalty,” Ashes sniffed, “is for dogs. Cats have better sense.”"

"Alice scooped the cat into her arms and planted a kiss on his fuzzy forehead. “What was that for?” Ashes sputtered. “What have I ever done to deserve that?” “I wanted to say thank you,” Alice said, putting him on the ground. “For everything.” “Yes, well. Far be it from me to dispute my own heroism,” Ashes muttered. “But proper thanks should involve tuna.”"

"“There’s this thing called dignity that some cats have been known to have. You might want to look into it.” “A cat is always dignified, no matter what position he finds himself in,” Ashes said. “A half-cat even more so.”"

"Ashes looked around at the palm trees, the perfect ocean, and the immaculate beach. “Ugh,” he said. “I’m in hell.”"

"Michael cleared his throat. “You’ve never had a dog, Alice?” Alice shook her head. “My father didn’t like them.” “They’re not like cats,” the boy said. “You give them commands.” “Because they lack all dignity,” said Ashes under his breath."

"It was a bit like trying to tie both shoelaces at once, one with each hand."

"Maybe that’s wisdom, seeing things that are obvious."

"“I wouldn’t try it,” Alice said. “They’re bigger than you are.” “They’re all wing,” he said dismissively. “Believe me. Large birds are the natural prey of the cat.” “Maybe once they’ve been roasted and carved,” Alice said. Ashes snorted."

"“I apologize for Ashes,” Alice said to Michael. “He’s a cat, and—” She paused, and decided that seemed like a complete description. “He’s a cat.”"

"They have servants. I’d rather have friends."

"“Don’t tell me this is about protecting humanity,” Alice said. “None of you cares one bit about the people in the real world. This is about power, just as it always has been. You’re afraid of losing a little bit of power.”"

"“He saved me, I saved him,” Alice said. “The usual, really. What else are friends for?” “If you ask me,” the cat said, “friends ought to keep you out of situations where you need saving.”"

"The truth can be useful, sometimes. Assuming you can convince people."

"“They were pretty friendly, for dancing skeletons,” Isaac said, waving after them. “If I’ve learned one thing,” Alice said, “it’s not to judge by appearances.”"

"‘‘This isn’t some stupid storybook where the underdog wins in the end. This is the real world. The strongest do what they want, and everyone else has to live with it. Or”—she glanced significantly at Isaac—“not.”"

"“Ashes, how did you do it?” “I’d like to say it was all my own talent, but cats are naturally modest.”"

"“The strongest don’t always get what they want,” she said to Ending. “Not when the weak can work together.”"

"Well, I don’t ever plan anything in my books. Since I don’t outline, I tend to just go wherever my imagination leads me and where I feel excited to write about. I tend to write scenes that I would want to read."

"It was definitely overwhelming and surprising. Going into it, I was just hoping that the fans of the book would feel happy and that it brought the story to life in a way that satisfied them. It was really gratifying to see so many people embrace it who were being introduced to it for the first time."

"Immigrant parents don’t want their children to suffer or have to live harder than they did."

"When it comes to adapting a story for film, I think being able to understand what’s being asked of you and what you offer to the process is really important, and for me, I’ve always seen it as being the emissary: being the ambassador of the fans and understanding what they want. I’ve been with these books for a long time, so I understand what it is that readers like about them, and I wanted to make sure that that was still present in the movie. It was less important to me to have details correct about setting and more about the feeling that you get when you see the film, which is, I hope, a cozy and warm feeling that makes you feel really hopeful."

"There’s something very compelling about the immediacy and urgency of adolescence. As a storyteller, I’m drawn to first times and to how intense all of those emotions can feel in the moment. What’s interesting for me is being able to honor that and treat it with respect, and not think that because it’s about young people, it’s somehow less important of an experience."

"I'm not one of those writers that drafts out 500 pages, and then cuts a bunch of stuff, and then does new stuff on the fly. I'm just a lot more slow. And my process is every word pretty much gets used. I don't really have a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor from the books. I mean, some conversations and smaller scenes, but I don't think there's any big plot point or anything that I wrote but didn't use."

"Writing for me, 95% of the time, it's torture, because I'm basically walking through the forest blindfolded trying to feel my way through and then I'm almost there, and I can sort of take it off and then see where I'm at, and then I have to go back and sort of move things around and make sure it's all feeling cohesive. But the process itself can feel really arduous and a real struggle to get through. I think everyone has their own process and mine is particularly torturous."

"What I would say is, don’t even look at a screen. Get a notebook and pen. For me, I always prefer to start writing with a pen. For me, the blank page is just a possibility. It’s like, "What can I feel on this page?" That’s really exciting. But if I look at the blank page, it feels like pressure. With a notebook, you can scribble down whatever you want and you can move things around the page. It’s never really gone. You can always find it again. It feels a little less free for me on a computer. I guess that would be my tip. Just start really organically with paper and a pen."

"I don’t outline anything in advance. That can be really scary. I liken it to walking blindfolded. I’m trying to head towards somewhere, but I have no idea how to get there. I don’t write in order, either. I’m taking things as they come, following my fancy."

"I don't plan anything out and I don't write in chronological order. The emotional tenor is what guides me, but a lot of it is feeling my way through the dark. That's okay if you have unlimited time to work and stumble upon things in a delightful way, but under a deadline it can be really stressful. The most joyful part of writing for me is when I am 90% there, and suddenly the story clicks into place and things finally start to make sense."

"I think that with a book, you can excavate a story so much more because you're really in the character's head and you can go into much deeper detail. In a movie, what you might spend pages describing, you can do that in a flash. But there's also a feeling that you have to really streamline a movie too so it stays on the right track. And I think I would say that there are definitely changes made, but I think that to me, the spirit of the story is there. And that was what was most important to me, was just that people walked away with the same feeling that they had when they read the books, which is just, I hope, feeling a warm-hearted, cozy feeling."

"My confidence makes me strong. Dedicat­ing a lot of my life to my profession and feeling fulfilled makes me strong. Having a family and a husband who chal­lenge me makes me strong."

"I kind of knew coming back after giving birth was gonna be a process and that I was going to have to be patient with myself and my body. [But] I definitely put pressure on myself."

"The fight that we are doing right now for equal pay does not mean that we will achieve it in the short term. We are not going to get the equal pay right away, but it may be done by the time my daughter plays soccer and she will not suffer what we suffered."

"I want to show that I deserve to be at the top. I want to be the best player that I can be, that I can be a valuable member of the team after being a mother."

"You have to figure it out you have to be mom and a professional athlete. There’s a lot of athletes going to Tokyo that are also fellow mom athletes and I’m excited to catch up with them and kind of just represent all the moms, soccer moms united."

"When you have 12 teams in an Olympics in comparison to a World Cup where you have double that amount of teams, I think every single team is going to be difficult."

"Before I got pregnant, my mindset was like, it’s possible that I’ll never reach my potential again."

"I loved sports from a really young age. I told my parents that I wanted to become a professional soccer player when I was like 7 years old. But I think when I realized that I had the potential to be a professional soccer player, or compete for my country in a world tournament, was probably when was... I would say like 17 years old. I had a scholarship to go to college. I was on a national team, and I knew that was what I was going to do. I wanted it more than anyone else. And I was willing to work harder than anyone else to achieve that."

"But also... being a professional athlete is totally different now than two years ago, before being a mom athlete. Priorities change and you have to get up and go to training and do your job, and make the most of it, and know that when you come home there's no time to let your body stretch and just lay on the couch."

"I definitely think that I would be a different person without sports; they taught me so much. Just about myself, patience, teamwork, listening... it's taught me so much that I feel like I've applied to being a mom."

"I would say I'm good at organizing things, like trips or vacations. I'm always the one to book the flights, and do things like that. I like to do my research. I wouldn't say I'm a super type A personality, but I like to be organized when it comes to travel and vacation."

"I feel like for me, I'm tapping into a whole new level that I didn't have before getting pregnant. I was really scared going into pregnancy thinking that I might not get back to playing for my country ever again, or playing as well as I was before. And I think that's something that some female athletes do have a fear of, and so for me, I want to be as open as possible in my journey, in showing women that we are capable of incredible things and that we can be professional athletes and moms. Our bodies are capable of going through incredible things."

"We’re trying to do the same thing and we’ve come a long way. But it gets exhausting having to do this every day, every week. Our male counterparts have not had to fight as much – so sometimes you feel a little exhausted always having to prove yourself and show your worth."

"To force a change sometimes you need to stand up. You know what you’re worth – rather than what your employer is paying you. We’re not scared. To move the women’s game ahead we need to do what’s necessary. I feel other national teams are looking at us for that guidance."

"I understand there’s much more money in the men’s game. But Fifa spent so much time on the men they now need to focus a little more on us. I would like to close that gap even if I’m not expecting it to be equal. I’m not expecting there to be a huge jump and the win bonus to be $35m when, for the women, it’s $2m. I don’t think the entire world respects women in sport. But if Fifa start respecting the women’s game more, others will follow."

"Anyone see us?" Harry asked as they sped away down the street. "I didn't see anyone in the windows," said Marv. "I thought you said they were gone." "We both watched them leave this morning, birdbrain," Harry snapped. "Then who was that?" Marv asked. "I don't know," Harry said. "I didn't see anyone. I swear I don't get it. I know they all left." "And I know I ain't goin' near that house again," Marv said. "Cool it." Harry ran his fingers over his hair. "I'm gonna figure this thing out and then we are going back. That's the best house on the block."

"How'd you know I was here?" Kevin asked. "I know you and Christmas trees," Kate said as she rubbed a tear out of her eye. "I guess this is the biggest one around, huh?" Kevin said. Kate smiled. "Let's go tell Dad you're all right." "Where's everyone else?" Kevin asked. "At the hotel," Kate said, sliding her arm around his shoulders. "They're in New York?" Kevin gasped, wide-eyed. Kate smiled. "They didn't like the palm trees either."

"Tell me the truth, Henry," she said. "Tell me what happened the night Richard died. "Don't you know?" Henry asked innocently. "I'd like to hear it from you," Susan said. "I was downstairs playing..." he began. Susan knew he was lying. She knew by the tone of voice he used. He used it every time he'd lied to her, and he'd lied to her many times. "Don't lie to me," she snapped angrily. "I'm sick and tired of your lying." She found herself shaking him by his shoulders. "Henry, tell me the truth: Did you kill Richard?" Henry pulled away and regarded her coolly. It was a look that was unnatural in a boy of his age. "So what if I did?"

""Come on," she said. "Let's go home." They turned and started back toward the house. Mark carried the dead brown flowers. Susan carried her memories and grief. Behind them they left Henry and the tombstone, which read: HENRY EVANS 1981-1993 WITHOUT DARKNESS THERE CAN BE NO LIGHT"

"Anyone looking for simple black-and-white answer to the problem of school violence involving guns will not find it here. Like Beth Bender and Dick Flanagan, I have no one answer. But I do have suggestions: The manufacture, importation, and possession of all semiautomatic assault-type weapons should be banned. The sale of handguns should be restricted to the military and law enforcement agencies. Children should be taught from the earliest age to respect one another's differences. Schools should enact zero tolerance for teasing. Students' achievements off the field should be valued as highly as those on the field."

"If these changes are going to occur, they will have to start with you, the young person reading this book. If this story has moved you, then it will be your job to keep those ideas alive, to examine your own life and your own school, to keep these issues in the forefront with open discussions and debate. Mine is the generation that will see true gun reform continually stalled by lobby-fattened politicians. Yours is the generation that may someday have the power to make the real changes that will save young lives."

"Todd Strasser has written many award-winning novels for teens and adults. Several of his works have been adapted for the screen, including Workin' for Peanuts, A Very Touchy Subject, and Over the Limit, which he adapted himself. A former newspaper reporter and advertising copywriter, Strasser worked for several years as a TV scriptwriter on such shows as The Guilding Light, Tribes, and Riviera. The author of nearly forty novels, Strasser lives with his family in a suburb of New York City."

"Let me tell you for nothing it was a great relief to find all my toes in the right order and with the right amount of skin and bone. You miss them fierce when you don’t have them."

"I had just sat on the edge of the river with my knees right up against my chest and cried because ten is too young to know that sometimes your parents have to do what’s best for you even if it hurts you. Even if it hurts them."

"I breathed in the smoke from my final cigarette. It tasted like acceptance of growing up."

"The Worme Bridge’ stood out for us with its brave story and clear, distinctive voice; it’s a wonderfully dark exploration of the water theme. The story works effortlessly to construct an other kind of reality while grounding itself in the real world. The writing is compelling: the reader is drawn into this family and the strangeness that overtakes them. We found this a powerful piece of writing that continues to haunt the reader afterwards."

"She liked to disappear, even when she was in the same room as other people. It was a talent, as it was a curse."

"What you dream, you can grow."

"The persecution of people who are different, whether it's women as witches, whether it's Jews, whoever it is, it always comes from the same place of being against anyone who's different. Fear of the other."

"Artists have themes that they go back to—that they are haunted by and obsessed with."

"I think it's bad for writers to think too much about what their themes are, or to over-intellectualize their own work. I think it is much better for readers to think about that. They are not defensive, so they usually understand it at a different level, a purer level. I don't want to understand it too thoroughly. I just want to do it."

"The weak are cruel. The strong have no need to be."

"He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say."

"When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure."

"“For me—as I think it is for a lot of women and girls—I felt that they were figures that had power, and I felt very powerless,” she said. “It was just very exciting and thrilling to think of a witch who didn’t care if she was portrayed as ugly—which of course, I felt like I was—or not beautiful enough or whatever, but still had power and didn’t need to be rescued.”"

"It is clear when reading about the Holocaust that evil exists. But what was less apparent to me until I began to do research (for "The World That We Knew") was how much good there also is in the world."

"For me, magic is reading and writing."

"I don't think it's a good idea to compare yourself to anyone. You are who you are and no one can write the way you do. I always want to tell that to young writers. The most important thing is to tell your story."

"I usually do start with setting. I try to build a fictional world, and then hope that the characters will walk into it."

"I think that I always wanted to tell the stories of women who were not able to tell their own stories."

"I didn't believe in writers block until I had it. After 9/11 I couldn't write and the way I got out of it was to read one of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury...(Why couldn't you write after 9/11?) AH: I was so depressed and hopeless about the state of the world. When I re-read Fahrenheit 451, a book about how important books are, I was reminded of the reason to write."

"I always think it helps not to think about anyone reading your work, but to write what you would want to read."

"If you do not believe in evil, you are doomed to live in a world you will never understand. But if you do believe, you may see it everywhere, in every cellar, in every tree, along streets you know and streets you've never been on before. In the world that we knew, Hanni Kohn saw what was before her. She would do whatever she must to save those she loved, whether it was right or wrong, permitted or forbidden. (first lines)"

"The most she dared to wish for now was to live long enough to become a woman. (p46)"

""We must hope for the best," she told the girl. She might have said more if she'd had the freedom to speak her mind, but in her formation she hadn't been given the choice to confide what she felt. If she could do so there would have been much she would have said: how green the verdant countryside was, how bright the light had become, how grateful she was to her maker each and every minute, how the birds in the treetops could be heard even when the train rumbled by, how the first of the season's bees hit against the windowpanes as if searching for flowers, how absolutely marvelous it was to be in the world. (p72)"

"What they held in common was their aloneness, and in time, thrown together, with no world other than their own, they grew close. (p103)"

"This is how it began, out of water, out of clay, out of air, when it was not expected, when it should have never happened, when no one else understood who she was. (p113)"

"Two brilliant colleagues who were now wearing rags, carrying their children on their backs, thinking of starvation rather than algebra. (p116)"

"She was finally here, in the place where she had found a future. Still, night after night, the past was with her. (p197)"

"the Germans had researched her family; they were very thorough after all, and they knew things about her grandfather that she herself didn't know. She would think of this in the camp they took her to after she was arrested, how little she knew about the person she loved most in this world. (p214)"

"It was a wonder, a message that all things were possible, even in this cruel world. (p215)"

"You are the man I admired most of all, Julien would say to him if he could, if they were lying side by side watching the universe expand all around them. (p283)"

"'Because of this what transpired between them was something they hadn't expected, it was almost as if they had fallen in love in a world where anything could happen and nothing was impossible. (p295)"

"Every now and then a crow would soar past with a gold ring or coat button in its beak, a shiny souvenir of murder. (p298)"

"Human lives were like quicksilver; let go and they vanished. But not this time. (p319)"

"He realized how little he knew of this world, but he knew this: If you could love someone, you possessed a soul. (p348)"

"If you are loved, you never lose the person who loved you. You carry them with you all your life."

"That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind. It brought up ancient fears and scattered them on the street like pearls. To fight what was wicked, magic and faith were needed. This was what one must turn to when there was no other option."

"He wondered why it was only when you were at the end of your life that it was possible to view it with honesty and truth."

"Other people’s judgments were meaningless unless you allowed them to mean something."

"Know that the only remedy for love is to love more."

"I just do the best I can to face what life brings. That’s the secret, you know. That’s the way you change your fate."

"that was kind of the '60s mentality, too—you didn't need to be published, that was mainstream. You just wanted to be an artist and create something."

"For me—and I think for most writers—you're a reader first and then it just happens. You so love it that you want to be part of it, and you start writing."

"It's so easy for me—and probably other writers—to write something and think, "This is garbage, I'm throwing it out." But if you give yourself time, you can write your way into the story. So I try not to read it until I have about 50 pages. Then I feel like I have enough distance, and I'm not as highly critical of myself."

"(Have you noticed a change in the industry toward women writers since you began writing?) AH: I don't think women are treated the same as men in anything, so why would they be treated the same in literature? I think that there's a different standard, and it's difficult for women, even though, weirdly, it's women who read the most fiction. I don't know what the right word for it is, but I think that some women writers are not looked at with the same kind of respect or seriousness."

"For people who want to be a writer—and maybe this is true for anything you want to be in life—if one person believes in you, that's enough. And my grandmother really believed in me."

"Even though laws have changed we still have so many social constraints and so many rules that we set for ourselves and that society sets for us. It’s very difficult still to be a woman."

"I don’t think about rules when I’m writing – that’s the great thing about writing: it’s the one place in my life that I can do whatever I want."

"For me, reading and magic always went together...For me, literature and magic have always gone together in terms of subject matter but also in what literature does to a reader – it casts a magic spell."

"In a way, I feel survival is always my subject matter."

"(Whom do you consider your literary heroes?) Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Emily Brontë, Ray Bradbury, all for different reasons, all adored."

"(Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today?) All time — Emily Brontë, author of the greatest psychological novel ever written, with the most complex character ever conceived...My favorite novelist working today is our greatest living writer, Toni Morrison. Nothing compares with her lyrical, heart-wrenching, gorgeous prose."

"I have no guilt regarding my love of fantasy and science fiction, only pleasure. I grew up reading the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I chuckle over how this “genre” has become mainstream and how time travel, alternative universes and magic are now so everyday. Plus, no one could ever feel guilty about reading writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick."

"no book makes me furious. Maybe sad, or lost, or confused, but mostly joy and wonder are the emotions involved. That’s why I prefer books to people."

"That’s still the best reading experience: falling in love with a book I meet by accident."

"you can't run away by ignoring the truth. Truth follows you; it comes in through open windows and drifts under doors. When it comes to sorrow, no one is immune. (preface)"

"I've always believed there is a very thin line that separates readers and writers. You make a leap over that line when there's a book you want to read and you can't find it and you have to write it yourself. (preface)"

"I wrote to remind myself that in the darkest hour the roses still bloom, the stars still come out at night (preface)"

"Don't forget books. What would life be without them? Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, William Faulkner. Read the greats-they're great for a reason. They know how to chart the human soul. (p 32)"

"I've often wondered if I spent too much time inside of books. If perhaps I ended up getting lost in there. I feared that reading, and later writing, stopped me from living a full life in the real world. I still don't know the answer to this, but I'm not sure I would have gotten past being twelve without Ray Bradbury, and I know that imagining the plot for my novel The River King during a lengthy bone scan helped me get through that test. (p 35)"

"During my radiation treatment I read Man's Search for Meaning. People said, Isn't that book depressing? But it wasn't. It was honest...We are all responsible for our actions, and our reactions. We are responsible for how we respond to situations we cannot control. (p 43)"

"Write it down. Even if it's a few sentences. Because you won't remember. You think you will never forget, but you will. Write down your life story or a poem. Sometimes shorter is better. Make a list of what all you have loved in this unfair and beautiful world. (p 82)"

"Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen."

"Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity."

"This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed."

"Here is the riddle of love: Everything it gives to you, it takes away."

"For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town. If a damp spring arrived, if cows in the pasture gave milk that was runny with blood, if a colt died of colic or a baby was born with a red birthmark stamped onto his cheek, everyone believed that fate must have been twisted, at least a little, by those women over on Magnolia Street. It didn't matter what the problem was-lightning, or locusts, or a death by drowning. It didn't matter if the situation could be explained by logic, or science, or plain bad luck. As soon as there was a hint of trouble or the slightest misfortune, people began pointing their fingers and placing blame. Before long they'd convinced themselves that it wasn't safe to walk past the Owens house after dark, and only the most foolish neighbors would dare to peer over the black wrought-iron fence that circled the yard like a snake. (beginning)"

"Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think. (p59)"

"No one knows you like a person with whom you've shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way. (p84)"

"The lonelier you are, the more you pull away, until humans seem an alien race, with customs and a language you can't begin to understand. (p145)"

"I never even believed in happiness. I didn't think it existed. Now look at me. I'm ready to believe in just about anything." (p161)"

"Many of us know what it's like to try to escape a family legacy of one sort or another, only to discover that in the long run we carry our heritage with us no matter how far we might run."

"Witches are outsiders, and those among us who have been bullied and ostracized can relate to their plight. Part of our fascination with witches is that they are the only female mythic figures with power. These are women who don't need to be rescued by a prince or a king but, instead, can save"

"I start writing a novel with a question I need answered. Practical Magic addresses serious questions about the place of women in our society-questions that are as important, or more so, than they were twenty-five years ago. Unfortunately, over the past quarter century, the place of a woman in society has not moved forward as we had wished, then and now. There are still many of the same issues left to address: equal pay, childcare, healthcare, sexual assault. Magic may not be able to right these wrongs, but sisterhood just might. The years have only intensified the importance of telling women's stories, and doing our best to ensure that women who have been forced to be silent can speak and tell their own truths."

"I loved magic from the start, beginning with the stories my Russian grandmother told me. If "magic" was in the title of a book, I was bound to find it. In the world of fairy tales, the amazing is recounted in a matter-of fact tone, with the practical and the magical living side by side. One day there is a knock at the door, or a rose that blooms through the winter, or a spindle that must be avoided at all costs. It was the melding of the magical and the everyday that was most affecting to me as a reader, for the world I lived in seemed much the same. People you loved could disappear, through death or divorce; they could turn into heroes or beasts. My personal experience and my childhood reading left me longing for a world in which anything could happen, magic or not, on an ordinary day."

"The family dynamics are complex; and as often happens in our own lives, how we view the people close to us, even when they are fictional characters, depends on where we stand in the world at that time."

"I believed anything can happen. It was a huge escape for me as reader. I loved anything that could remove me from reality and make me see possibilities. Fiction in general gives you the freedom of exploring the truth without boundaries, to get to a deeper truth, and fairy tales have always been my model."

"I've always tried to go directly from sleep to the computer, before I have the time to start censoring myself. I like to get up at 5:00. I do my best work early in the morning before the world's awake. For the kind of fiction I write, which is emotional fiction, you have to let go. Let the walls down, the defenses down. Don't worry about what people are going to think."

"I always feel you're writing the book you couldn't find, so you have to write it yourself."

"I believe literature can change things"

"you will find elements of magic realism in literature from all over the world—not just in Latin America. You will find it in Scandinavian sagas, in African poetry, in Indian literature written in English, in American literature written by ethnic minorities. Writers like Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, and Alice Hoffman all use this style."

"My favorite writer is Alice Hoffman; she’s brilliant."

"Alice Hoffman takes seemingly ordinary lives and lets us see and feel extraordinary things."

"It was when I first went to school that I found out that I was a Maori girl... I found that being different meant that I could be blamed..."

"I never found myself in a book. The children I read about lived in other countries, lands of snow and robins. Sometimes they lived in large houses and had nurses and maids to look after them. They did not belong in extended families, did not speak as I spoke. There were malevolent aunts and terrible stepmothers. It was wrong to be poor. If you were poor you usually did some brave deed that made you rich by the end of the story, when you would marry a princess or a prince. Or you died in the snow while selling matches. Maidens and Jesus were fair. No one was brown or black unless there was something wrong with them or they held a lowly position in society."

"Every society has its own stories – old stories, but very importantly, new stories too, that give identity to the self and explain that particular world. If there are no books which tell us about ourselves, but tell us only about others, that makes you invisible in the world of literature. That is dangerous."

"This first part of the story is about two sisters, Ngarua and Maraenohonoho, who quarrelled over a canoe."

"The days before my wedding were full and busy ones but more so for my mother than for any of us. It was summer, with the sun skidding day after day across a flawless ice-blue sky, taking with it all moisture from creeks and pastures, draining the hills and gullies to a sleek ivory. It was the nearest we would get to a white Christmas in these parts."

"The city was a great loom weaving its tangles and tufts of people into haphazard multicoloured fabric."

"Autumn bends the lights of summer and spreads evening skies with reds and golds. These colours are taken up by falling leaves which jiggle at the fingertips of small-handed winds."

"I grew up amid two worlds, having close, continuous and frequent contact with each. These were two different and contrasting spheres that I inhabited, both full of life and vitality: my mother's Pākehā family and my father's Māori whānau. (chapter 2 p18)"

"To get back to writing the 'ordinary lives of ordinary people'. This is what I believed I was doing when I wrote Potiki. Land and language issues are part of everyday life for Māori. On the whole, the novel was well received. It has stood its ground and seen its way into the world. But it rocked the boat at the time. It showed Māori in a positive light, living in a functional community and being preyed upon by evil Pākehā wanting to wrest land from them by lying and cheating. It was regarded as political correctness (of which there was no greater sin) gone haywire. It was a 'minor miracle', a snide reference to miracle plays, angels and devils, where good triumphs over evil. But land protests at the Raglan Golf Course in the 1970s and at Bastion Point in 1977 and 1978 brought the nation's attention to what was happening in the ordinary lives of Māori people all over the country-injustices that had been ongoing for decades, and still continue. (chapter 18 p198)"

"I found this to be a way that works for me--placing myself at the centre, keeping characters and ideas close, and from the centre reaching to the outer circles, in any direction, for what I need in order to bring everything together. (chapter 18, p189)"

"['Reading Readiness'] aligns with the whakatauāki 'A tōna wā ka mōhio.' 'In their own time they will know.' So, whether actual word recognition and textual meaning begins at four, or five, or eight, or later, what does it matter? There's a whole lifetime of reading exploration ahead as long as the interest has been fostered. Building towards that time of readiness, and children being successful in the building, was what mattered. (chapter 17 p180)"

"Who is my audience? My answer to that has to be that I am the first audience. I write for me and I must be the sole judge and take full responsibility for what comes about. The second audience, the one unknown to me, is whoever will read. Once I've finished a book or a story, my job is done. Reviews, analyses, critiques, theses are not written for me. They come after the event. What follows the reading, discussion, dissection, opinion is part of the next life of the book, that is, if it is to have an afterlife. I should say, though, that if Maori readers did not relate to my writing, or if they rejected it, I would not do it. (chapter 18 p200)"

"When I left teaching, I imagined myself spending every possible minute scribbling, or sitting for hours in front of the computer, and for some months this is what I did. But I soon came to realise that, for me, the writing life needs real life and interaction going on. So, though I did spend time writing every day, often long hours on week days, I found myself caught up in the many activities associated with family and community life as well. (chapter 19, p214)"

"It's what I like to do--describe settings and circumstances, create images, and in so doing expose my own emotional responses to time and place. Underlying it, though, is an anxiety, the concern that it could all slip away, or that we could slip away from it; that we who walk the Earth, treading so heavily and selfishly, could be the authors of our own demise. We have to do better. (chapter 27 p297)"

"To be well in spirit is the most important health. [She] was the song of that run-down house. She was its roof, its walls, its windows, its doors. She was its song. To be well in spirit is the most important wellness. To be well in spirit lifts the physical and mental state to an extraordinary level. All are affected by it. Dark thoughts disappear."

"I'm not sure of the reason for it, but during those days of caring for [her], my thoughts would often return to the time of my childhood when I would hear the old people say that we earthlings are related to the stars. The stars are our flesh and blood. I came to understand that this must be true in the deepest sense. We come from the dust of stars. (chapter 27 p213)"

"You and I grew together and we are inside each other's hearts. We don't have to explain. We know. We understand. (Chapter 25 p198)"

"There are reasons we become ill or dispirited. It's what Oriwia was referring to. There's always a cause. Sometimes we bring sickness or punishment upon ourselves through carelessness, distraction, transgression, or failing to dedicate the day or the task. Weak moments may invite wrong forces. Sometimes sickness is caused by a vengeful person such as Oriwia describes. I have seen those affected by the spite of others become ill, go mad, become lame, turn black, drop dead, die slowly. I have seen their children born with ailments and deformities. (Chapter 25 p198)"

"Salt cures. Sea washes. It cleans. Expanse enlivens the spirit, frees the mind."

"there's singing in the mountains, laughter in the trees, dancing in the light of evening fires. There's whispering in hearts and minds and shadows. That's enough for me. (chapter 31 p238)"

"Dear Rimini and Benedict, You didn't deserve ill-humour and rebuff, and I had no right to send you off with empty hearts when all you were asking was to get to know your 'father'. 'Father' is what you said. You probably think I'm still a bit loony. It's probably true. After you'd gone I kept thinking about my war notebooks. Everything I could tell you, more than I could ever tell you about your 'father', is contained in them."

"In a snow-covered field death is contorted, limbs are angled or unjointed, torsos are splayed or crumpled or torn apart. Eyes are the frozen eyes of statues. Men are marble, broken angels. (chapter 12 p98)"

"It's only now that I remember the racket that went on. At the time you become immune to the sounds around you because you're so busy concentrating on where you must go, what you must do to stay alive. There's no room in your head for anything else except your survival. But the roar of guns, the screaming, the din catches up with you eventually. Also the sights that you see affect you more at a later stage than they do at the time. I won't forget men in a row. I won't forget men on fire. I won't forget a tin hat rolling, spinning across the embankment with the head of a man inside. Sounds and sights wait inside you, along with the stink of smoke, gunpowder, mud and rot and burning flesh. They invade your waking hours as well as your dreams."

"There was once a carver who spent a lifetime with wood, seeking out and exposing the figures that were hidden there. These eccentric or brave, dour, whimsical, crafty, beguiling, tormenting, tormented or loving figures developed first in the forests, in the tree wombs, but depended on the master with his karakia and his tools, his mind and his heart, his breath and his strangeness to bring them to other birth. The tree, after a lifetime of fruiting, has, after its first death, a further fruiting at the hands of a master. This does not mean that the man is master of the tree. Nor is he master of what eventually comes from his hands. He is master only of the skills that bring forward what was already waiting in the womb that is a tree - a tree that may have spent further time as a house or classroom, or a bridge or pier. Or further time could have been spent floating on the sea or river, or sucked into a swamp, or stopping a bank, or sprawled on a beach bleaching among the sand, stones and sun. It is as though a child brings about the birth of a parent because that which comes from under the master's hand is older than he is, is already ancient. (beginning of Prologue)"

"The shore is a place without seed, without nourishment, a scavenged death place. It is the wasteland, too salt for growth, where the sea puts up its dead. Shored seaweed does not take root but dries and piles, its pods splitting in the sun, while bleached land plants crack and turn to bone. Yet because of being a nothing, a neutral place - not land, not sea - there is freedom on the shore, and rest. There is freedom to search the nothing, the weed pile, the old wood, the empty shell, the fish skull, searching for the speck, the beginning - or the end that is the beginning. Hope and desire can rest there, thoughts and feelings can shift with sand grains being sifted by the water and the wind. I put my bag down there one evening and rested, leaving a way for the nothing, the nothing that can become a pin-prick, a stirring. I took warm clothing from my bag and waited through the night for the morning that would become a new beginning. (Roimata, chapter 1 p18)"

"Only [he] could secure me, he being as rooted to the earth as a tree is. Only he could free me from raging forever between earth and sky - which is a predicament of great loneliness and loss. (Roimata, chapter 3 p23)"

"I had other stories too, known stories from before life and death and remembering, from before the time of the woman lonely in the moon. Given stories. But before life and death and remembering' is only what I had always thought. It was a new discovery to find that these stories were, after all, about our own lives, were not distant, that there was no past or future, that all time is a now-time, centred in the being. It was a new realisation that the centred being in this now-time simply reaches out in any direction towards the outer circles, these outer circles being named 'past' and 'future' only for our convenience. The being reaches out to grasp those adornments that become part of the self. So the 'now' is a giving and a receiving between the inner and the outer reaches, but the enormous difficulty is to achieve refinement in reciprocity, because the wheel, the spiral, is balanced so exquisitely. These are the things I came to realise as we told and retold our own-centre stories. (Roimata, chapter 5 p39)"

"although the stories all had different voices, and came from different times and places and understandings, though some were shown, enacted or written rather than told, each one was like a puzzle piece which tongued or grooved neatly to another. And this train of stories defined our lives, curving out from points on the spiral in ever-widening circles from which neither beginnings nor endings could be defined. (Roimata, chapter 5 p41)"

"'Nothing wrong with money as long as we remember it's food not God. You eat it, not worship it...' (chapter 13 p94)"

"We could not afford books so we made our own. In this way we were able to find ourselves in book It is rare for us to find ourselves in books, but in our own books we were able to find and define our lives. But our main book was the wharenui which is itself a story, a history, a gallery, a study, a design structure and a conga. And we are part of that book along with family past and family yet to come. The land and the sea and the shores are a book too, and we found ourselves there. They were our science and our sustenance. And they are our own universe about which there are stories of great deeds and relationships and mage and imaginings, love and terror, heroes heroines, villas and fools. Enough for a lifetime of selling. (Roimata, ch23 p104)"

"The stories had changed. It was as [he] had said, the stories had changed. And our lives had changed. We were living under the machines, and under a changing landscape, which can change you, shift the insides of you. (Roimata, ch23 p151)"

"She did not agree with our acceptance of a situation, which was not a deep-down acceptance, but only a waiting one. She saw the strength of a bending branch to be not in its resilience, but in its ability to spring back and strike. (Roimata, chapter 23 p152)"

"The hills did not belong to us any more. At the same time we could not help but remember that land does not belong to people, but that people belong to the land. We could not forget that it was land who, in the beginning, held the secret, who contained our very beginnings within herself. It was land that held the seed and who kept the root hidden for a time when it would be needed. We turned our eyes away from what was happening to the hills and looked to the soil and to the sea. (Roimata, chapter 16 p110)"

"Everything we need is here, but for some years we had had little contact with other people as we struggled for our lives and our land. It was good now to know new people and to feel their strength. It was good to have new skills and new ideas, and to listen to all the new stories told by all the people who came. It was good to have others to tell our own stories to, and to have them there sharing our land and our lives. Good had followed what was not good, on the circle of our days. (Toko, chapter 21 p145)"

"...gifts are legacies, that once given cannot be taken away. They may pass from hand to hand, but once held they are always yours. The gift we were given is with us still. (Roimata, chapter 25 p159)"

"...the scars will heal as growth returns, because the forest is there always, coiled in the body of the land. (Roimata, chapter 26 p169)"

"She told of gifts that she'd been given, and how gifts once given cannot be taken away and do not change. Gifts did not change even though there could be a shifting in the self caused by pain. (The Stories, chapter 28 p174)"

""People are strength too. Care for people and you are cared for, give strength to people and you are strong. It's land and people that are a person's self, and to give to the land and to give to the people is the best taonga of all. Giving is strength. We've always known it..." (The Stories, chapter 28 p176)"

"The old woman sang of a time gone ahead, and of those already walking ahead of her on the pathways. Her eyes were reddened as though they bled. And her songs, like the pathways, were interweavings of times and places and of all that breathed between earth and sky. And the pathways and the songs went into a time beyond the thumbing down of the eyelids. (The Stories, chapter 28 p180)"

"...the telling was not complete. As the people slept there was one more story to be told, a story not of a beginning or an end, but marking only a position on the spiral. (The Storles, chapter 28 p180)"

"I'd had a glossary in a previous work and then I suddenly thought that a glossary is there for foreign languages, italics are there for foreign languages. I didn't want the Māori language to be treated as a foreign language in its own country."

"I was okay about being Māori. I was okay about being brown, because this had been reinforced positively by my parents and their families. But I always had it in the back of mind, these people don't understand. They don't know. Along with that there was often the assumption that I wasn't clean, I wasn't clever, you know. These were the things that hurt me."

"I had always loved writing, but I didn't kind of know that a writer was something one could aspire to be and that was partly because I'd never read writing by New Zealand writers."

"Though I had always liked books, any books, any written-down words or expressions, the ones I read as a child were always exotic. I never found myself in a book."

"In many stories blackness was equated with evil: devils, witches’ clothes, unlucky cats, bad wolves. New Zealand history was told from a Eurocentric point of view, if it was told at all."

"At the time I gave the paper (1987), New Zealand history was still being evaluated from a Eurocentric viewpoint. It generally glorified the European settler experience and by doing so negated the Māori experience and settlement of Aotearoa. A look at some of the vocabulary in use could be taken as a quick example. Take “pioneer” and “settler”. These referred to British pioneers and settlers. The ancestors of the Māori children sitting in our classrooms were referred to in many less complimentary terms. They were savage barbarians, hostile, cunning. Warlike. Yet the British with all their guns and armoury, sweeping in on many indigenous areas of the world, were never referred to as warlike. In those times, the wars between Māori and Pākehā were still being referred to as “Māori Wars”. A British fighting force was an army. A Māori fighting force was a war party (a term still in use). British fighters were soldiers or colonial forces. Māori fighters were rebels and raiders and warriors (again, still in use). A successful battle by the colonial forces was a victory, by a Māori fighting force a massacre."

"If there are no books which tell us about ourselves, but tell us only about others, that makes you invisible in the world of literature. That is dangerous. If there are books and stories about you but they are ones belonging only to the past, it is as though you do not belong in present society. That is dangerous. If there are books about you but they are negative, demeaning, insensitive and untrue, that is dangerous. Multiply this by what appears on television, in advertising, teacher attitudes, health services, questionnaires, testing and examinations and in many areas of society, maybe we shouldn’t wonder at the low self-esteem, low self-confidence, and therefore the disengagement of many Māori children with education."

"in the early days I didn’t know what real creative writing was. I thought it was just imitating what had been read. I don’t know – trying to write a new Conan Doyle-type mystery, cobblestone streets, or something like that. That was until I came across writing by New Zealand writers, which was very late – after I’d left secondary school. I started to hear the New Zealand voice in literature and to understand that real writing is writing that comes from your self – your dreams, imaginings, emotions, dreads, desires, perceptions – what you know. Part of what you know comes from the research that you do. Those early influences were people like Frank Sargeson and Katherine Mansfield. I started to experience the New Zealand settings, hear the New Zealand voice in what I was reading for the first time, and then when I came across the writing of Amelia Batistich, a New Zealander of Dalmatian origins, I thought well, this is a different New Zealand voice. It started to click with me that I might have my own voice too. The penny dropped rather late for me. As well as Batistich there were all the Maurices [Gee, Shadbolt, Duggan], as well as writers like Dan Davin, Robin Hyde, Ruth Park, Ian Cross, Marilyn Duckworth, Janet Frame. All added to my enlightenment and to the realisation that I would have a voice of my own. I knew also that there were people who I could write about, or characters I could invent, based on people I knew, who hadn’t really been written about before. There were stories about them, but not written ones."

"I think the time was just right for myself and for people like Witi Ihimaera and Hone Tuwhare. The real pioneers were JC Sturm, Rowley Habib, Arapera Blank, Rose Denness and Mason Durie and those writers I had started to see published in the journal of the Māori Affairs Department, Te Ao Hou."

"I have a confidence now that I didn’t have in the early days, when I’d sometimes think ‘This is too terrible. I’m never going to be able to do this.’ I never feel like that now. I know there’s always going to be a way, or that you can just chuck something out if it’s too annoying. That’s a solution as well."

"I wasn’t a very talkative child and I’m not a greatly talkative adult even, but I do enjoy listening to people, and language and how it’s used. It becomes part of my own store."

"That’s what I like to do. I just start out and follow the characters."

"what was the best part of writing. The main thing for me is characters. I don’t really worry about anything else. I don’t think about the storyline too much actually – just the characters and what might happen to them because of who they are and where they are and who they interact with. The settings, the stories, the themes and the voices and everything else, the inter- relationships – all belong to the characters. So if you keep true to those characters and how they might develop because of who they are and who they have around them and, to a degree, what happens to them, then the story will unfold. I’ve learned to have faith that something will come out."

"People need to inhabit the work. I’ve always been interested in writing about those interrelationships – especially the intergenerational ones. It’s a matter of finding ways of doing that which enable different characters to have clear identity. Storytelling is one way I’ve found very useful – having different characters telling about the same things, each one bringing a new aspect and further enlightenment to the accounting."

"I don’t have a sense, when I begin a new work, of standing at the beginning of a long road and looking along it to an end. Instead I have a sense of sitting in the middle of something – like sitting in the centre of a set of circles or a spiral – and reaching out to these outer circles, in any direction, and bringing stuff in. That’s what makes it all closer to me, being in the centre and having all I need within reach around me and piecing it together. So there I am, at the core, with my core idea – the few sentences about the Japanese man – thinking about what I need to bring this character to life and to shift him from A to B."

"When Potiki first came out there was quite a bit of criticism of it. One of the reasons was because of the use of Māori terms and passages in the book; the other was that some people thought I was trying to stir up racial unrest. The book was described as political. I suppose it was but I didn’t realise it. The land issues and language issues were what Māori people lived with every day and still do. It was just everyday life to us, and the ordinary lives of ordinary people was what I wanted to write about, so I didn’t expect the angry reaction from some quarters. But there was one deliberate political act, and that was not to have a glossary for Maori text or to use italics. A glossary and italics were what were used for foreign languages, and I didn’t want Māori to be treated as a foreign language in its own country."

"Learning about each other is not as one-sided as it used to be."

"I’ve always loved the short story form. Short stories are like little gems that you can keep polishing and polishing in your aim for perfection."

"The more I look into these matters the more I think that what happened to the baby happened for the same reason that land is taken, or cultural items, or indigenous knowledge. It's a new area of colonisation."

"Why is it that one set of stories is called "mythology", and another set of stories is called "the truth"?"

"When I get really stuck I want to get back to nothing, to nothing at all, so that I can allow 'something' to come. It's a clearing.... For me te kore is part of the process of writing, of searching, of starting out with nothing and making something of it."

"("have you ever thought of yourself as a member of a corpus of post-colonial writers?") I try to keep away from that sort of vocabulary and theorising. I'm aware of my work being classified, but don't want to be influenced in any way by those classifications — or by reviews or analyses. I need to keep myself as free as I can from commentary. I have to judge my own work for myself, do things my own way, make my own choices and decisions. I must own what I do. Once a work has been published it's been given. It's gone."

"I'm not against research of any sort. I fully understand the importance of research. But I'm against theft. I'm against appropriation — where those who are powerful use their power to take from those who have less power, and then rationalise this by saying that what they are doing is for the greater good; or that those less powerful people will benefit. They never do. It's about sovereignty. There is nothing wrong with one group giving to another because they have absolute understanding of all aspects of what is going on and want it equally as much for the same reasons. It needs to be a giving, not a taking. And research needs to be done primarily to benefit those about whom research is being done — who need to have the say, the power, the knowledge, the 'sovereignty' regarding the project."

"my books are a giving — the first act in communication. Once the book is out there I've done my bit. It's gone. Anything that happens to the book after that is out of my hands, and I've consented to that. Whatever way the book is taken up afterwards is all to do with the next stage of the communication. Reading, reviewing, study, dissection, and commentary are all the business and work of other people — they're all part of discussion. It may all be part of promotion and distribution as well. In other words, if the book is well received then that is encouraging to me. I benefit. I put the book out there to be read and discussed — but if I put it out there and it heads for oblivion, so be it."

"To me, 'sovereignty ' means having authority over one's own life and culture. It is a right and something that should not have to be fought for. Terms such as 'self-determination' are not high enough, not good enough terms for this"

"'Decolonisation' is what needs to happen in the minds and understandings of everyone, including Maori, so that issues can be properly addressed and equity brought about. There can't be equality, no matter how many catch-up policies are instigated, until the issues of racism and decolonisation are addressed."

"We don't live in a vacuum, we don't just stay in a little antiseptic spot with nothing happening; there is something happening around us and inside us all the time."

"my aim is not to repeat. I always want to look for something new to attempt."

"It's as though the pushing outward allows understanding to drop down-as though you've given words, ideas, sometimes conventions, a really good shake. Then you look to see what's happened. (Interviewer: How do you push the edges, as you put it? Do you do it through language?) PG Through using language in some different way, through trying different structures, through experimenting and trying to break the rules."

"(What would you say is the main motivating factor that keeps you writing?) PG: I keep wanting to explore, that's probably my main motivation. I want to go where the writing leads me and find out how I'm going to be able to put across what I want to say. I'm looking for new things to do all the time, new ways of reaching out."

"I think that with writing, every experience is important; everything that happens around us or near us or inside us, or that is part of ourselves. When people ask me where ideas come from, I say they come from my own background and my own experience. That experience and background includes everything that happens - what people say and do, and how they say and do it. It includes dreams and imaginings, thoughts and hopes, and desires and disappointments."

"Patricia Grace's writing is as delicate as Japanese brushwork, yet as poignant and throat-aching as the loss of a loved one."

"Grace's stories make a shining and enduring place formed of the brilliant weave of Maori oral storytelling and contained within the shape of contemporary Western forms. We are welcomed in, and when we get up to leave, we have been well fed, we have made friends and family, and we are bound to understanding and knowledge of one another."

"When I began to write in the 1970s there were three women I considered my elders: Katerina Mataira, Arapera Blank and Jacquie Sturm. They were like spinners working on a loom and their great triumph, together with that of Hone Tuwhare and Patricia Grace, was to begin spinning the tradition from which all contemporary Maori writers come."

"If you get all your schoolwork for the day done in, say, three hours, you can spend the rest of the time reading or making up stories or whatever else."

"Better to be strong than pretty and useless."

"I guess since the groin is the center of a guy's world, he rarely guesses it isn't the center of yours."

"People don’t really want to know anything about you. They just want you to fit into their little predetermined slots. They decide what you are in the first two seconds, and they only get nervous or upset if you don’t live up to their snap judgments."

"His shoulder bumped mine again. "Can I ask you something?" I didn't answer. He was going to ask me anyway. People don't say that if they don't want to pry something out of you."

"Hello, Officer? Can you help me? My dad got turned into a zombie. You know, we’ve been travelling around getting rid of things that aren’t real, and this time they hit back. I really need someplace to stay – but can you make sure I have some holy water or something wherever it is? And some silver-jacketed bullets? That’d be sweet. Yeah, that’d be totally cool. Thanks. And while you’re at it, can you tell the guys with the straitjackets that I’m really sane? That would help."

"That's the funny thing about old hurts- they just wait for new heartache to come along and then show up, just as sharp and horrible as the first day you woke up with the world changed all around you."

"People don’t really want to know anything about you. They just want to put you into their little preordained slots. They decide what you are in the first two seconds, and they only get nervous or upset if you don’t live up to their snap judgements. That’s the only way the normal world’s like the Real – it all depends on who people think you are. Figure that out, play to what they expect, and it’s clear sailing."

"I got a washed out version of Mom’s curls and a better copy of Dad’s blue eyes, The rest of me, I guess, is up for grabs. Except maybe Gran’s nose, but she could have been trying to make me feel better. I’m no prize. Most girls go through a gawky stage, but I’m beginning to think mine will be a lifelong thing. It doesn’t bother me too much. Better to be strong than pretty and useless. I’ll take a plain girl with her head screwed on right over a cheerleader any day."

"Graves scooched a little closer to me, and I didn't even think about it. I put my arms around him and hugged. I didn't care if it hurt my arm and my ribs and my neck and pretty much every other part of me, my heart most of all. When you're wrecked, that's the only thing to do, right? Hold onto whatever you can. Hold on hard."

"Finally I met my mentor Nobel Laureate & the next President of East Timor 🇹🇱 Sir Jose Ramos today. He will be taking oath (President's Inauguration) tomorrow. Despite his busy schedule, he personally came down to meet me in my hotel. I'm deeply touched by his gesture &humbleness."

"Usually at such big events, only foreign presidents and prime ministers are invited as special guests. I feel this invitation is very special and has a great message on how small island countries like East Timor are threatened by climate change,"

"“The inclusion of climate activists in every field and decision-making process is quite important."

"I will listen to their stories and will also tell the world about the problems they are facing. We will talk about long-term peace and development and how we can fight climate change together,"

"My voice will represent the unheard voices of the millions of people of the world and also for the countless, voiceless animals.thumb|Licypriya"

"I was born in a small village of Manipur in North East India surrounded by lush green mountains and an alluring atmosphere. I never realized what I’m doing is activism until 2018 when people started calling me a climate activist. In 2016, I came to Delhi for the first time for my schooling, but my life became very messy due to the high air pollution level. Later, I moved to Bhubaneswar, Odisha, in the same year for my schooling. Again my home in Odisha was hit by Cyclone Titli in 2018 and Cyclone Fani in 2019. These incidences in my life turned me into an outspoken child that talks about the impact of climate change to our leaders when they failed to act on it."

"Indigenous people are playing a crucial role in protecting our planet. We are not on front covers, but we are the first line of defenders. Due to rising violence against Indigenous communities around the world, it’s an alarming situation for all of us along with the bigger challenges of protecting our forests and the environment. Even in my home state, the government has given licenses to big foreign companies based in the Netherlands to exploit our indigenous forest for oil exploration while local people are opposing it. Many Indigenous activists are in jail or are even murdered in several places across the world. Denial of the climate crisis by our leaders increases the threat to us. As both the climate movement and Indigenous rights movement are fighting for the common cause, it’s time to come together to strengthen our movement with one common voice to protect our rights and to defend the defenders. We are interconnected and interdependent. The climate movement will fail without indigenous people."

"Climate change has no border. India is also equally responsible for the global carbon emissions. Developed nations should invest more for a green economy as compared to developing ones, but India can lead and be a role model in fighting the climate crisis because we have full potential to do so. Besides the EU and the United States, two of the highest global carbon emitters like China and India are two giant neighboring countries and they’re not doing enough. They are still giving huge subsidies to fossil fuel companies, which are responsible for massive carbon and greenhouse gases emissions globally."

"Climate education is very important if we really would like to fight the climate crisis. Adults are not doing enough already, and I don’t have much faith in them to come to the frontline and save our planet and future. The last hope is children. If we include climate education in schools, then we can fight climate change from the grassroots. It will help to educate adults and our leaders via their children and grandchildren, so that we altogether can support each other to save our environment and our planet. This also increases environmental consciousness among the people in addition to a love and respect for nature. I am even preparing to go to court to direct the government to include it as mandatory in all national curriculums of various school boards. I trust it will be a very successful mission."

"Our leaders need political willpower to cut down emissions and become a net-zero, carbon-neutral country by 2035 or 2050. I understand developing countries have a bigger challenge. India also is a big country with a large population; our government faces a lot of challenges to set a deadline to achieve global commitments, but we need to increase the speed. I’m very much optimistic that if developed countries stand together with those developing countries, we can easily achieve the Paris Climate Agreement before the deadline. The biggest problem is that our leaders don’t trust each other. If they trust each other, we can easily fight the global climate crisis with a concrete action plan."

""Your action today will decide our future tomorrow. We are already the victim of climate change. I don’t want my future generations to face the same consequences again. Sacrificing the lives of the millions of innocent children for the failures of our leaders is unacceptable at any cost…After thinking many times, I decided to do this protest. Even my mom tried to stop me but I convinced her that ‘Everything will be alright.’ I am taking the risks of my life because I want to save our Planet and our Future. My voice deserve to be heard by the world. Let's stand together by uniting, instead of dividing.”"

"This will bring transparency and accountability to our leaders. This will benefit people, especially millions of poor people in the country,"

"I’m pressuring the government to ensure the health of every child in India. I will continue to put more pressure on our world leaders," Kangujam said. "The future is the children. The world needs to make a better planet for us. Our leaders need to act now before it’s too late.""

"I have come here to tell world leaders that this is the time to act, and it is a real climate emergency,” she began confidently. “When I was born, our leaders had already met 16 times in the COP and already knew about the bad effects of climate change.... So why should I come here, why should I speak here? I have to go back to my school, I have to play, I have to study….”"

"We rolled on, down Highway 25 and through the bluegrass hills of Kentucky. Soon we began to see signs. Signs that read: WHITE ONLY, COLORED NOT ALLOWED. Hours later, we left the Bluegrass State and crossed into Tennessee. Now we saw even more of the signs saying WHITE ONLY, COLORED NOT ALLOWED. We saw the signs above water fountains and in restaurant windows. We saw them in ice cream parlors and at hamburger stands. We saw them in front of hotels and motels, and on the restroom doors of filling stations. I didn't like the signs. I felt as if we were in a foreign land."

"Finally we reached Memphis. We got there at a bad time. Traffic was heavy and we got separated from the rest of the family. We tried to find them but it was no use. W had to go on alone. We reached the Mississippi state line and soon after we heard a police siren. A police car came up behind us. My father slowed the Cadillac, then stopped. Two white policemen got out of their car. They eyeballed the Cadillac and told my father to get out. "Whose car is this, boy?" they asked. I saw anger in my father's eyes. "It's mine," he said. "You're a liar," said one of the polciemen. "You stole this car.""

"Still though, I often thought of that Cadillac. We had had the Cadillac for only a little more than a month, but I wouldn't soon forget its splendor or how I'd felt riding around inside it. I wouldn't soon forget either the ride we had taken south in it. I would remember that ride and the gold Cadillac all my life."

"I wanted also to be very clear for young people coming out what their work is. And your work is not to make your mom accept you. That's your mom's work. Your mom has to work to understand what she needs and ... the best ways that she can love you. Your work is to just live authentically and as honestly as you can."

"When you lose yourself, dig deep into your ancestry, because you will find the pieces there."

"Just like Captain America did in 1941, and who knew we'd need America Chavez to punch Nazis in 2018."

"That myth of having to go it alone and having to be tough doesn't serve us...it's in that space where softness and vulnerability meet strength that we transcend our everyday selves..."

"That we may be better acquainted with our colony of New Spain, of its peculiarities, its riches, the people who possessed it, and the beliefs, rites, and ceremonies which they heretofore held, we wish to be informed of all matters appertaining to the Indians during their existence in that land before the coming of our liberating forces, ambassadors, evangels, and colonizers."

"Your Most Lofty Majesty's royal cédula specifies that we, in providing the chronicle, shall inform ourself "from ancient Indians." This has necessitated something of a search, inasmuch as the total destruction of this city by Captain-General Hernán Cortés left us very few ancient Indians from whom to seek a credible oral history. Even the workers currently rebuilding the city consist mainly of women, children, the dolts and dotards who were unfit to fight in the sige, brute peasants conscripted form the outlying lands. Oafs, all of them."

"Think, imagine, picture yourself, Your Excellency, as that tree of great shade. See in your mind its immensity, its mighty boughs and the birds among them, the lush foliage, the sunlight upon it, the coolness it casts upon a house, a family, the girl and boy who were my sister and myself. Could Your Excellency compress that tree of great shade back into the acorn which Your Excellency's father once thrust between your mother's legs? Yya ayya, I have displeased Your Excellency and dismayed your scribes. Forgive me, Your Excellency. I should have guessed that the white men's private copulation with their white women must be different—of more delicacy—than I have seen them perform forcibly upon our women in public. And assuredly the Christian copulation that produced Your Excellency must have been even moreYes, yes, Your Excellency, I desist."

"My life has been long, as ours is measured. I did not die in infancy, as so many of our children do. I did not die in battle or in holy sacrifice, as so many have willingly done. I did not succumb to an excess of drinking, or to the attack of a wild beast, or to the creeping decay of The Being Eaten by the Gods. I did not die by the contracting one of the dread diseases that came with your ships, and of which so many thousands upon thousands have perished. I have outlived even the gods, who forever had been deathless and who forever would be immortal. I have survived for more than a full sheaf of years, to see and do and learn and remember much. But no man can know everything of even his own time, and this land's life began immeasurably long ages before my own. It is only of my own that I can speak, only my own that I can bring back to shadow life of your rusty black ink...."

"I have heard you Christians complain of our "multitudes" of gods and goddesses, who held dominion over every facet of nature and of human behavior. I have heard you complain that you never can sort out and understand the workings of our crowded pantheon. However, I have counted and compared. I do not believe that we relied on so many major and minor deities as you do—the Lord God, the Son Jesus, the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary—plus all those other Higher Beings you call Angels and Apostles and Saints, each of them the governing patron of some single facet of your world, your lives, your tónaltin, even every single day in the calendar. In truth, I believe we recognized fewer deities, but we charged each of ours with more diverse functions."

"The building themselves, from the distance, were dark and indistinct of contour, but the lights, ayyo, the lights! Yellow, white, red, jacinth, all the various colors of flame—here and there a green or blue one, where some temple's altar fire had been sprinkled with salt or copper filings. And every one of those shining beads and clusters and bands of light shone twice, each having its brilliant reflection in the lake. Even the stone causeways that vault from the island to the mainland, even those wore lanterns on posts at intervals along their reach across the water. From our acáli, I could see only the two causeways jeweled chain across the throat of night, with the city displayed between them, a splendid bright-jeweled pendant on the night's bosom. "Tenochtítlan, Cem-Anáhuac Tlali Yolóco," murmured my father. "It is truly The Heart and Center of the One World." I had been so transfixed with enchantment that I had not noticed him join me at the forward edge of our freighter. "Look long, son Mixtli. You may experience this wonder and many other wonders more than once. But, of first times, there is always and forever only one.""

"No man ever took better care of his life. He lived only to go on living." I waited for more, but he said no more, so I asked, "What became of him, Master Cuachic?" "He died." "That is all?" "What else ever becomes of any man? I no longer remember even his name. No one remembers anything at all about him, except that he lived and then he died."

"Surely my life awaits, whichever way I go from here, and whether I go alone or not." The cacao man smiled too, but ironically. "Yes, at your age, many possible lives await. Go whichever way you choose. Go alone or in company. The companions may walk with you a long way or a little. But at the end of your life, no matter how crowded were its roads and its days, you will have learned what all must learn. And that will be too late for any starting over, too late for anything but regret. So learn it now. No man has ever yet lived out any life but one, and that one his chosen own, and most of that alone."

"Your Astute Majesty can hardly have failed to notice that the earlier pages have treated—casually, without remorse or repentance—of such sins as homicide, prolicide, suicide, anthropophagy, incest, harlotry, torture, idolatry, and breach of the Commandment to honor father and mother. If, as it has been said, one's sins are wounds of one's soul, this Indian's soul is bleeding at every pore."

"To command respect and deference and privileges reserved for the nobility, I need only dare to be a noble."

"You tell me then that I must perish like the flowers that I cherish. Nothing remaining of my name, nothing remembered of my fame? But the gardens I planted still are young— the songs I sang will still be sung!"

"Your Most Lofty Majesty has earlier bidden your chaplain to secure "writings, tablets, or other records" to substantiate the tales told in these pages. But we assure you, Sire, that the Aztec exaggerates wildly when he speaks of writing and reading, drawing and painting. These savages never created or possessed or preserved any mementos of their history aside from some plicate paper folders, skins and panels bearing multitudes of primitive figures such as children might scribble."

"The gods supposedly know all our plans, and know their ends before their beginnings. The Gods are mischievous, and they delight to potter with the plans of men. They usually prefer to complicate those plans, as they might snarl a fowler's net, or to frustrate them so the plans come to no result whatever. Very seldom do the gods intervene to any worthier purpose. But I do believe, that time, they looked at my plan and said among themselves, "This dark scheme contrived by Dark Cloud, it is so ironically good, let us make it ironically even better.""

"And then suddenly I feel tears in my eyes. I bring up to cover my face and when I speak, my voice is all high-pitched and wobbly. "I feel like shirt." "Oh, Charlie." Tori puts down her crisps and pulls me into a hug, running one hand over my back. "It's okay." I shake my head into her shoulder, trying not to get tears all over her dressing gown. "It's not okay... it's really not okay..." She lets me cry into her shoulder for a few minutes before she speaks again. "I think you need to talk to him.""I don't know what to say," I whisper. "Just something. Anything." "He hates me." "That's untrue." "He's angry." "That's temporary." "I don't know what to say." "It doesn't matter what you say," she says. "You just have to say something.""

"Do not underestimate the strength it takes to be kind in a world as cruel as ours."

"Slaves deserve to be remembered just as much as queens."

"First, a story ends when it ends, and not a moment before. If you are unhappy with this ending, make a new one."

"The past devours those naive enough to forget it."

"The pain you have endured does not justify the pain you inflict on others."

"This is my mind. I am the strongest person here."

"Nothing good can come of a place that refuses to see the pain of the people on whose backs it was built."

"....to aid even one person is to save an entire world."

"The people we lose never truly leave, but that only we get to define how they stay."

"Teach me what you know."

"Life is full of cheaters [...] If you're playing fair, you're not playing to win."

"I don't think you're weak for being scared. I don't think you could be as strong as you are if you weren't."

"If I asked you to catch me the moon with your bare hands, how would you do it?" she asked suddenly. Adil closed his eyes, and Karina could not stop staring at the way the gold light illuminated his dark skin. When the moon began to set, I'd wait with my hands beneath it until it sank right into them. And then I'd turn around and give it to you. He turned to his side and gave Karina a shy smile. But that's a stupid answer, isn't it?"

"The best way to honor them would be to take them with her toward whatever lay on the other side of that marvelous sunrise."

"You tear yourself down for things you could not have known or done... why punish a seed for not yet being a tree."

"Amari loved the rusty brown dirt of Ziavi. The path, hard-packed from thousands of bare feet that had trod on it for decades, was flanked on both sides by fat, fruit-laden mango trees, the sweet smell of which always seemed to welcome her home."

"We must welcome our guests, then, Amari. We would never judge people simply by how they looked—that would be uncivilized…Let us prepare for a celebration."

"The crowd is eventually separated, the men from the women, and shoved into a large, dark building where Amari can smell “sweat and fear…body wastes and hopelessness”"

"The spirit of the copper sun seemed to bleed for them as it glowed bright red against the deepening blue of the great water."

"Oh no! not at all; perfectly well—never was better in my life,” he said, becoming all at once preternaturally grave."

"To sleep at your post! shame on you! Had you been a sentinel in time of war that nod would have cost you your life, supposing you to have been caught in the act."

"I know something about the monkey tribes, but I cannot say that at this moment I remember any particular habit of which we might avail ourselves."

"If I go to sleep and the fires die down, who knows but wild beasts may come upon us and kill us before we can seize our arms."

"Red is the color of sanctity. It’s the color pure girls will bleed when Elder Durkas tests them."

"Infinite Wisdoms caution against talking to unmasked women, against even looking at them. They may be demons in disguise."

"They enrich themselves by your suffering—parasites, quite literally draining the blood from you."

"I know no good comes from comparing what I have to what they have, but seeing all that money and privilege, and having none, hurts. I try to convince myself that being a scholarship kid doesn’t matter, that I shouldn’t care."

"The familiar sense of peace rises inside, and my hands stretch toward the piano. And then I play."

"Even though I know I shouldn’t care, it annoys me that when girls know what they want and how they’re going to get it, they’re seen as cocky. But guys who know what they want? They’re confident or strong."

"Perhaps if hierarchies weren’t so important and people weren’t constantly trying to take me down, maybe I’d be more trusting of people, and Ava and I would be more than just two girls using each other to survive high school."

"Most people think the three of us are friends, since we’re almost always seen together. But we’re not friends. Our relationship is a transaction."

"High school is like a kingdom, only instead of temperamental royals, golden thrones, and designer outfits flown in from Europe, the hallways are filled with loud postpubescent teens, the classrooms with rows of wooden desks and students dressed in ugly plaid skirts, navy-colored slacks, and stiff blue blazers."

"What Harp doesn’t understand is that I like my parents—current hiccups in sanity not withstanding."

"“I’m Harp,” my best friend says, business-like. “This is Viv. Personally, I think you guys would make really cute babies together.”"

"“That’s part of the prophecy of the Rapture, right? The dead will rise and crash our parties?” He laughs. “Do you really think that’s a priority, for the reanimated corpses?” “Absolutely,” I say. “No French onion dip in purgatory.”"

"“I mean, these people really believe what they believe.” “But what they believe is so absurd.”"

"In addition to founding the Church itself, Frick was the CEO of its accompanying multimillion-dollar corporation. They publish the magazines and run the Church television networks, and they produce end-of-the-world provisions like these—bottles of Holy Spring Water, a bland SpaghettiOs knockoff called Christ Loops."

"Even now I think I could only list for him the various things I don’t believe in. But still I wish I could. Because I’m starting to narrow it down. I don’t believe in hate. I don’t believe in money. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe it’s too late."

"“This whole country,” says my grandmother evenly, “supports a culture of ignorance and anti-intellectualism which posits that not understanding a phenomenon is just as valid as understanding one, and frankly I’m sick of it.”"

"“But it was probably nothing.” “Nothing is nothing anymore, Viv.”"

"(“For God saw that Americans were industrious and made money in His name, and he saw that it was good”). It’s one of the many parts of the Book of Frick that makes you wonder whether or not Frick was just straight-up on ’shrooms when he was writing it."

"Believer culture seems to shift so quickly, from benign to terrifying and back again."

"It’s funny now to think that we were ever confused by extreme action taken in the name of God."

"Behind him shines the blinking neon of a casino:"

"But I can’t justify the act to myself, no matter how much I like making out with the boy I’d be trying to save. That would be playing by Believer rules—telling myself that violence and the threat of it is okay, if that’s what it takes to get you what you want. “For God so loved the world,” says the Book of Frick, “that he sent us guns with which to protect our homes and women.”"

"I wonder if this is what bravery is: adrenaline plus love plus absolute stupidity."

"I’ve always believed Frick to be detached from reality, but I thought he was just a megalomaniac, a manipulator, a con artist. Now I begin to slowly understand. He’s far more dangerous than any of those things. He’s a true Believer."

"“What? Why the fuck are you smiling?” “Because you’re so like Winnie, it’s actually spooky. You both clearly possess the take-no-shit gene.”"

"We could conceivably slow this destruction down, but it would require huge overarching changes in the structure of our society—the kind of change we will never achieve so long as we remain distracted by imaginary acts of God."

"I’m starting to understand how little purchase the truth actually affords us in this world."

"I will never understand why Believers cling to this kind of language, this relentless empty optimism, plus all! those! exclamation! points!"

"Harp gives me a look. “What?” “You are terrible at lying, Viv. Embarrassingly bad. Have I taught you nothing?”"

"Everyone seems absurdly rich and very drunk. I notice with annoyance that there’s no adherence to modesty here: I see short skirts and plenty of cleavage, bare necks adorned by jewels. I guess if you have enough money, the Church will overlook a selection of your sins."

"How many simple pleasures I denied myself, because I thought that’s what goodness was. How stupid that it took me until the end of the world to realize it was something else entirely."

"If I ever had patience for believers who wanted to convince me of my own wickedness, I’ve officially run out of it."

"It’s not enough for the Believers to feel abandoned—they need to know they’ve been lied to. Otherwise someone down the line will try again."

"“Bless him”—the Messiah raises a shiny copy of the New Apocalypse Edition of the Book of Frick—“for leaving us this miraculous book, this new edition of his Holy Word, available for only nineteen ninety-nine at Church of America megastores worldwide.”"

"If there are any doctors in the house, could we get Mr. Masterson some medical attention? It would be a shame if he were to pass away before he’s prosecuted for his crimes."

"Phil Cooper was eleven years old when he began to understand that his father meant to bend him to his will."

"our little niece came tearing out to meet us."

"The story begins as the Pilgrim family, along with the rest of the Whanganui branch of The Children, move south to Nelson, to join with another branch. The reason for the move is unclear, but the teenagers assume it has something to do with needing to match-make, as many of the young females are approaching marriageable age – 16. Rebecca has lived her entire life within her family group, though she and the other children had to attend a ‘worldly school’ in Whanganui. It is a frightening prospect, then, when she is sent with her twin, Rachel, to sell produce at a farmers’ market on Saturdays in Nelson. This interaction with people who live their lives in freedom proves an eye-opener for both sisters."

"At no stage in the book does Beale let up on the tension, as we follow the sisters through impossible situations with regards to the Rule regarding every aspect of the Children of the Faith and how they manage themselves. The sisters must abase themselves each time they need to tell their Father something, for fear of earning hours of prayer. The tension builds, with death, bad marriage matches and new babies adding to it, until Rebecca begins to doubt, finally, the wisdom of her elders."

"cv_I_am_not_estherOne of the factors that contributes to Rebecca’s doubt is the not-insignificant fact that she, along with the rest of the family group, are meant to act as though their older sister and brother are dead, as well as her “trouble-causing” cousin, who she is continually required to stand up for. I am not Esther tells the story of the siblings and cousin who left the group – which to the family unit means they must be treated as ‘dead’. Rebecca is determined, in her own way, to remember that they existed, but not without guilt over this."

"While I won’t tell you what happens, I will say that Rebecca is a strong and admirable character. You feel that Beale really lets you into the mind of somebody who has grown up within a strict environment such as The Children of the Faith. Beale’s books have dealt with cults several times previously, but always from the outside looking in, so this is a refreshing point of view."