Lauren DeStefano

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We writers are resilient souls.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Lovers are weapons, but love is a wound.”