Victoria Schwab

“There are no monsters in the dark.”

“Imagine a place where the dead rest on shelves like books.”

“I am a man, not a movement,” he said. “But if a movement is what it takes to end this war, then I will play my part.”

“Lying is easy. But it's lonely.""What do you mean?""When you lie to everyone about everything, what's left? What's true?""Nothing," I say."Exactly.”

“Listen to me,” he said, pulling off his coat. “You need to stay awake.”She almost laughed, a shallow chuckle cut short by pain.He tore the lining from the Colton jacket. “What’s so funny?”“You’re a really shitty monster, August Flynn.”

“Wesley's touch lingers on my skin. His music echoes through my head. I remind myself as I scrub my skin that we are both liars and con artists. That we will always have secrets, some that bind us and some that cut between us, slicing us into pieces.”

“Ignorance may be bliss, but only if it outweighs curiosity. Curiosity is a gateway drug to sympathy.”

“You wanted to feel alive, right? It doesn't matter if you're monster or human. Living hurts.”

“The only way to truly record a person is not in words, not in still frames, but in bone and skin and memory.”

“He leans in, resting his weathered hand on the bed. "Treat all the bad things like dreams, Kenzie. That way, no matter how scary or dark they get, you just have to survive until you wake up.”

“He was like one of those pictures full of small errors, the kind you could only pick out by searching the image from every angle, and even then, a few always slipped by. On the surface, Eli seemed perfectly normal, but now and then Victor would catch a crack, a sideways glance, a moment when his roommate's face and his words, his look and his meaning, would not line up. Those fleeting slices fascinated Victor. It was like watching two people, one hiding in the other's skin. And their skin was always too dry, on the verge of cracking and showing the color of the thing beneath.”

“His gaze settles on the discarded book. He leans, reaching until his fingertips graze Dante's Inferno, still on its bed of folded sheets. "What have we here?" he asks."Required reading," I say."It's a shame they do that," he says, thumbing through the pages. "Requirement ruins even the best of books.”

“People were messy. They were defined not only by what they'd done, but by what they would have done, under different circumstances, molded as much by their regrets as their actions, choices they stood by and those they wished they could undo. Of course, there was no going back - time only moved forward - but people could change. For worse.And for better.It wasn't easy. The world was complicated. Life was hard. And so often, living hurt. So make it worth the pain.”

“...something more than the sum of its parts-”