Quotes from Robin Wasserman

They wondered at the consequences of teaching a girl she was weak instead of warning her she was strong.

Sascha looked torn. Should she cram my head full of newfound terror that the world would reject me, or let me wander into the big, scary out-there, like a naive lamb prancing to the slaughter?

I did it all mechanically. Mechanically, as in without thought, as in through force of habit, as in instinctively, automatically, involuntarily. Mechanically, as in like-a-machine.

See, wrong guys think they're good. Evil guys don't think at all. They're just evil. And kind of lame. So whick are you?

Like when everything flipped upside down and the scream of metal on metal exploded the silence and the world churned around me, ground over sky over ground over sky, and then, with a thunderous crack and a crunching of glass and steel, a twisted roof crushing me into a gutted floor, ground, I wasn't surprised.

The chemicals were both highly flammable and highly toxic, and more than one inexpert bust had ended in conflagration.

Just because you can't take something back, doesn't mean you don't want to. Just because you want to, doesn't mean you try.

It was almost a relief, no longer having to be extraordinary. To give up on existential questioning and simply abide.

Now I wonder, Nicki said. Didn't we all? What it would be like to be one of them, to have power, be seen, be heard, be dude rather than sluts, be jocks or geeks, or bros or nice guys, or boys will be boys, or whatever we wanted instead of quantum leaping between good girl and whore. To be the default, not the exception, to be in control, to seize control, simply because we happen to have a dick.

Even now, I believe that to know how is useless if we do not know why. And there are too many who forbid us to ask.

Girls had to believe in everything but their own power, because if girls knew what they could do, imagine what they might.

Sam grudgingly acknowledged the role of consciousness, but argued this, too, was based on unexamined assumptions, dependent on an unfounded faith in the collapse of quantum indeterminacy, and we debated the many minds theory, hidden variables, multiverses, and materialism until the coffee went cold and I'd managed to forget I was anything but pure consciousness myself.

Loretta didn't have much time left for mothering, and once I was old enough to fry my own eggs, she started leaving me home with the cat. Then the cat ran away; she didn't notice. Poor

Dex's mother knew she should be afraid for her daughter. This, she'd been told, was the tragedy of being a girl. To live in fear–it was the fate of any parent, maybe, but the special provenance of a mother to a daughter, one woman raising another, knowing too well what could happen. This was what lurked inside the luckiest delivery rooms, the ones whose balloons screamed It's a girl!: pink cigars and flowered onesies and fear.

What it would be to be like one of them. To have power, be seen, be heard, be dudes rather than sluts, be jocks and geeks or bros or nice guys or boys-will-be-boys instead of quantum leaping between good girl and whore. To be the default, not the exception. To be in control, to seize control, simply because we happened to have a dick.

You tell me, Dex, what kind of a bullshit god doesn't care what you did or who you hurt as long as you say you're sorry? Forgiveness

People do crazy things when they're keeping girls locked up in their shed.

Dex's mother knew what it was to lose herself in someone brighter, to be trapped by the gravitational field of another sun. She knew what happened when it emerged that the sun was only a lightbulb, and what happened when the lightbulb burned out.

Never be sorry, never be frightened, never be careful - those were the rules of Lacey. Play by the rules, win the game: Never be alone.

cliche but accurate: Kick a football, then ask it whether it meant to fly. All action demands an equal and opposite reaction. You can't blame an object battered by inertial forces; you can't blame me, bouncing through the pinball machine of life.

Smash the right two particles together in the right way and you get a bomb. That's us, Dex. Accidental fusion.

It was only ours the way everything was ours: because the world we created between the two of us was secret and wholly owned.

My secret self, the scarecrow-Lacey built of twigs and mud and bark, the Lacey who was made of forest and would someday be summoned home.

I try not to think too much about an audience when I'm writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I've written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.