Quotes from Libba Bray

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.

Dude, this is a stoner conversation and we're not even high

She knew what it was to wait for someone who would never come home. She knew that grief, like a scar, faded but never really went away.

Beneath the skin, there is fear. Pain. Remorse. Yearning. Desire. A fierce longing for power. All of this. We are joined. It is as if we live in the center of a great storm. Around us the world of the realms revolves like a giant kaleidoscope, images refracted again and again. So many worlds! So much to know.

I had thought Felicity dangerous a moment ago, when she felt powerful. I was wrong. Wounded and powerless, she is more dangerous than I could imagine.

I can see his pain, see it in the way he runs his fingers through his hair, over and over, and I understand what it costs him to hide it all.

People always fear what they don't understand, Evangeline. History proves that.

People aren't always what you want them to be

I change the world, the world changes me.

The night's chilly breath tickles up my neck and finds my ear, whispering secrets only the wind knows.

What do you feel? I've never been asked this question once. None of us has. We aren't supposed to feel. We're British.

When she can't bring me to heal with scolding, she bends me to shape with guilt.

We are all unkind from time to time. We all do things we desperately wish we could undo. Those regrets just become part of who we are, along with everything else. To spend time trying to change that, well, it's like chasing clouds.

That's what living in their world is-a big lie. An illusion where everyone looks the other way and pretends that nothing unpleasant exists at all, no goblins of the dark, no ghosts of the soul.

The Corporation would like to apologize for the preceding pages. Of course, it's not all right for girls to behave this way. Sexuality is not meant to be this way - an honest, consensual expression in which a girl might take an active role when she feels good and ready and not one minute before. No. Sexual desire is meant to sell soap. And cars. And beer. And religion.

My misery is reaching epidemic proportions.

Think: who has vans, huh? Soccer moms and serial killers.

Because it is morning, it is morning, and there is so much to see.

A gentle breeze catches in the branches then and I hear it, soft and low, a murmured prayer--Gem-ma, Gem-ma--and then the leaves bend down and trail delicate fingers across my cold cheeks.

If God has nothing better to do than punish schoolgirls for a bit of tomfoolery, then I've no use for God.

The world expected girls to pluck and primp and put on heels. Meanwhile, boys dressed in rumpled T-shirts and baggy pants and misplace their combs, and yet you were suppose to fall at their feet? Unacceptable.

I've heard it said that God is in the details. It's the same with the truth. Leave out the details, the crucial heart, and you can damn someone with the bare bones of it.

And now I understand that truth casts a spell of its own, one I'm not sure of how to hold on to, though I'm desperate to try.

All things are possible.