"By night Alice knitted a scarf for nobody. She'd started it for Riley, and it seemed wrong, somehow, not to finish it. And then, in an odd brainstorm around the second week of August, she decided she'd make it for Emily. Even if she never got up the courage to give it to Emily, a knitter always needed to know for whom she knitted."

"A lifetime of planning could be canceled in less than five minutes, it turned out."

"What was it with Alice and her jobs requiring costumes? he wondered. It seemed to him a sign of her perpetual underemployment. And yet it made him ache for the eagerness and completeness with which she approached her life. She had her dignity, but it a broad way. It didn't confine her as it did other people. He looked at Monique in her dignified and attractive clothes. Angry as he was at Alice, Paul suddenly felt he could only ever want a woman in a dark green zippered jumpsuit."

"Her mother was always looking for confirmation that Riley was gay and also for proof that she wasn't."

"The one thing Alice knew was that she deserved neither pleasure nor comfort. She would mess up her heart, too."

"She wanted to see him, but she was afraid to. She wanted to keep her version of events for as long as possible. She didn't want to give him a chance to remember it all differently, to tuck it away in a package that was easier to seal off and easier to forget."

"The chief frustration of romantic love was that you couldn't make it go by yourself."

"Riley had been her best self with Paul. She had spent her happiest times with him. If she could stay the same in Paul's mind, then her real self was preserved, it existed in one place at least. When she was with him, even now, she could feel like that person she'd been before."

"Maybe they would be the first couple to achieve career success while having sex. They couldn't really teach classes or go to meetings, but maybe they could do conference calls. That lawyer route would be out of the question, which was all the better."

"I'm serious. They'll give you money to fight with people. You'll spend your days distrusting people and thinking of what will go wrong. You're an optimist. You'll get crushed by that." "I won't," she said defensively. "I'm not so fragile." He managed to get her hand again. He pulled her to a stop. "Everyone is fragile. Everything beautiful is fragile." She chewed on her cheek. She stared at her feet. She tried to blink the water back into her eyes before she looked at him again. "You want to fish for crabs?"

"Her surprise was physical. She was astonished, and at the same time she knew. There were many things in life like that. You couldn't imagine it, and then it happened and you couldn't really imagine it hadn't."

""So, are you writing or erasing?" she asked. "Writing. I erase by night." She looked at him carefully. He indicated no knowledge of what had gone on at the beach the night before. "I think you erase by day, too," she said."

"She didn't deserve it, which was to say she deserved better."

"She'd been so angry with him when she'd fallen asleep the night before, and now his lovely body was all around her, and the anger was nowhere to be found. With Paul, she could never remember where she'd mislaid her anger, even the times she promised herself she would go back and look for it later."

""Kids who grow up on a kibbutz together act like siblings. They almost never fall in love." It wasn't the only reason, Riley knew, but maybe it helped explain why Paul always kept Alice at a distance, judged her harshly, ignored her when she most wanted his attention. Because he knew someday he'd want to love her."

"We trusted ourselves when we were younger," Alice asked thoughtfully, somewhere between the Sunken Forest and Sailor's Haven. "Didn't we?" "Riley did," Paul said. "And we, to a lesser extent, did, too." "We trusted Riley." "Yes." "We didn't truest ourselves to be adults, though. We thought we knew better then." Paul shook his head, thinking. "The adults we had around didn't offer much promise. They offered us so many things not to do, it was hard to see what possibilities were left over."

"What was the matter with her? It was just him! It was the same old Paul. But it also wasn't. He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend."

"It was funny the things the three of them talked about. Often it was the concrete things they hung upon. Concrete or metaphysical, and very little in between. That was another leftover, a child's prerogative, in a way. They talked about fish and they talked about God. But it was all the stuff in the middle that came to preoccupy you as you grew older."

"It brought to mind the problem of babysitting for the children of family friends. They underpaid you because they felt they bestowed a favor by recognizing you as something other than a child yourself. Friends and favors made a mess of commerce, in Alice's opinion."

"Would her hair have gotten as dark as that? Could her shape have changed into that? No and no, obviously. At this distance, closing in at this speed, you knew a person by her posture, by certain unnameable qualities, and those weren't and couldn't be hers."

"She couldn't picture his face when he was gone. Every summer he came back wearing his same face that she could not remember."

"Some people had gifts that made them great at being kids. Riley had those gifts. She was fearless, and she was fair. She was effortlessly expert at skateboarding, sailing, running fast, coaxing a fish off of any line. She was the pitcher on the winning corkball team for seven years in a row. She was the first kid up on a surfboard. She was even good at indoor things, like card tricks and video games. She didn't believe in hierarchies - not even mothers. She was the one kid every other kid wanted to befriend, and she never used her power for ill."

"Cars were conveyors of privacy. Without them, you lived a lot more of your life out in the open. Where you went, who you went with. Who you waited for at the ferry dock. Who you brushed your hair for. You were exposed here, but you were also safe."

"Riley made it seem like they were all gods of their world, but Alice know that Riley was really the god. She just gave them turns sometimes."

"At last he sat up. " I had the strangest feeling before. Not strange, really. Probably natural. Just strange to me." "What is that?" said Alice, sitting up next to him. "I held those little girls up, and in the time it took the butterflies to come and go, I changed from thinking of them as people I might once have been to people I could one day have. Do you think your past can change into your future that quickly?""

"Alice felt disloyal to Riley when she began to realize, much later, that her natural talents, her ability to communicate and observe, her caution, her empathy, her love of knitting, suited her better to the grown-up world."

"“She was right about something else too,” Dimitri said after a long pause. My back was to him, but there was a strange quality to his voice that made me turn around. “What’s that?” I asked. “That I do still love you.” With that one sentence, everything in the universe changed. Time slowed to one heartbeat. The world became his eyes, his voice. This wasn’t happening. It wasn’t real. None of it could be real. It felt like a spirit dream. I resisted the urge to close my eyes and see if I’d wake up moments later. No. No matter how unbelievable it all seemed, this was no dream. This was real. This was life. This was flesh and blood.."

"“You’re beautiful in a battle”, said Dimitri. His cold voice carried to me clearly, even above the roar of combat. “ Like an evening angel come to deliver the justice of heaven.” “Funny”, I said, shifting the hold on my stake, “That’s kind of why I’m here.” “Angels fall, Rose.”"

"It was like one of these moments when people talked about their lives flashing before their eyes. Because as we stared at one another, every part of our relationship replayed in my mind’s eye. I remembered how strong and invincible he’d been when we first met, when he’d come to bring Lissa and me back to the folds of Moroi society. I remembered the gentleness of his touch when he’d bandaged my bloodied and battered hands. I remembered him carrying me in his arms after Victor’s daughter Natalie had attacked me. Most of all, I remembered the night we’d been together in the cabin, just before the Strigoi had taken him. We’d known each other only a year, but we’d lived a lifetime in it."

"Both Christian and Adrian had worried there would be some piece of Strigoi left in him, but their fears had been about violence and bloodshed. No one would have guessed this: that living as a Strigoi had hardened his heart, killing any chance of him loving anyone. Killing any chance of him loving me. And I was pretty sure if that was the case, then part of me would die too."

"“What did you see?” I shook my head, unable to look at her either. “A nightmare,” I murmured. “ My worst nightmare coming true.”"

""I will always love you." Then plunged the stake into his chest. It wasn's as precise as I would have liked, not with the skilled way he was dodging. I struggled to get the stake deep enough to his heart, unsure if I could do it from this angle. Then, his struggles stopped. His eyes stared at me, stunned, and his lips parted, almost like a smile, albeit a grisly and pained one. "That's what I was supposed to say.." He gasped out. Those were his last words."

"I would never forget Dimitri, not for the rest of my life. And this time, I wouldn’t forget his lessons. With a speed he wasn’t ready for, I struck out and plunged the stake through his chest. My strength was there- sliding the stake past his ribs and straight into his heart. And as I did it, it was like piercing my own heart at the same time."

"But my other words at the Mastranos’ had betrayed me: I have fun with him. Now, you should have fun with the one you love, but that shouldn’t have been what first came to my mind. I should have said, We strengthen each other, or, He makes me want to be a better person. Perhaps most importantly, He understands me perfectly. But none of that was true, so I hadn’t said those things."

"My heart shattered. My world shattered. You will lose what you value most It hadn't been me Rhonda was talking about. It hadn't even been Dimitri's life. What you value most It had been his soul."

"“It's not about you, okay? This time, it's about me. Not you. All my life, Lissa... all my life, it's been the same. They come first. I've lived my life for you. I've trained to be your shadow, but you know what? I want to come first. I need to take care of myself for once. I'm tired of looking out for everyone else and having to put aside what I want. Dimitri and I did that, and look what happened. He's gone. I will never hold him again. Now I owe it to him to do this. I'm sorry if it hurts you, but it's my choice!”"

"I set off, off to kill the man I loved."

"“Even I make mistakes." I put on my brash, overconfident face. "I know it's hard to believe—kind of surprises me myself—but I guess it has to happen. It's probably some kind of karmic way to balance out the universe. Otherwise, it wouldn't be fair to have one person so full of awesomeness.”"

"Good God, Men everywhere."

"My mother slapped me, the pain snapping me out of my daze. “Run!”, she yelled at me. “He’s dead! You are not going to join him!” I saw the panic on her own face, panic over me- her daughter- getting killed. I remembered Dimitri saying he’d rather die than see me dead. And if I stood there stupidly, letting the Strigoi get me, I’d fail both of them. “Run!”, she cried again. Tears streaming down my face, I ran."

"And it was memories like that that made it so hard to comprehend this quest to kill him, even if he was a Strigoi. Yet.. At the same time, it was exactly because of memories like that that I had to destroy him. I needed to remember him as the man who’d loved me and held me in bed. I needed to remember that that man would not want to stay a monster."

""You will lose what you value most, so treasure it while you can.”"

"I couldn’t be Mason’s girlfriend because when I imagined someone holding me and whispering dirty things in my ear, he had a Russian accent."

"You can't force love, I realized. It's there or it isn't. If it's not there, you've got to be able to admit it. If it is there, you've got to do whatever it takes to protect the ones you love."

"By the way, my name's Rose Hathaway. I'm seventeen years old, training to protect and kill vampires, in love with a completely unsuitable guy, and have a best friend whose weird magic could drive her crazy. Hey, no one said high school was easy."

"The other problem in my life is Dimitri. He's the one who killed Natalie, and he's a total badass. He's also pretty good-looking. Okay—more than good-looking. He's hot—like, the kind of hot that makes you stop walking on the street and get hit by traffic."

""Why?" I asked softly. The word was carried away on the wind, but he heard. "Because I want you." I gave him a sad smile, wondering if we'd meet again in the land of dead. "Wrong answer." I told him. I let go."

"“My name is Dimitri Belikov,” he said. I could hear a faint Russian accent. “I’ve come to take you back to St. Vladimir’s Academy, Princess.”"

"Forcing five-year-olds to spell Vasilisa Dragomir and Rosemarie Hathaway was beyond cruel, and we'd-or rather, I'd-responded appropriately. I'd chucked my book at our teacher and called her a fascist bastard. I hadn't known what those words meant, but I'd known how to hit a moving target."

"Time for the lecture. It was a good one-one of Kirova's best, which was saying something."