Most of the time – 99 percent of the time – you just don’t know how and why the threads are looped together, and that’s okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.
Grief is like sinking, like being buried.
Life isn’t life if you just float through it.
Holy mother of Lord Cocoa Puffs.
I close my eyes. An image flashes – emerging from the van with Julian after our escape from New York City; believing, in that moment, that we had escaped the worst, that life would begin again for us. Instead life has only grown harder.
We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all.
Love. I love you. I’ll always love you, my love. You are the love of my life.
His eyes are the color of honey. These are the eyes I remember from my dreams.
For a second I think about how easy it would be to pass back to the other side, to walk straight into the laboratories and offer myself up to the surgeons. You were right; I was wrong. Get it out.
This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.
I don’t understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.
We’re killers, all of us: We kill our lives, our past selves, the things that mattered. We bury them under slogans and excuses.
Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who’s with who and did you hear.
I am now officially married to Fred Hargrove. Nothing will ever be the same.
This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.
There are some losses we never get over.
The mark of the procedure. A real one. Lu is cured.
We leave Pippa behind, standing in the dark, teeming bowels of the camp, while the sun begins to stain the sky electric, and from all sides the guns draw closer.
And there it is: Even though we’re standing in the same patch of sun-drenched pavement, we might as well be a hundred thousand miles apart.
If Cassie was invalidated because she caught the disease, or because Fred suspected her of it, I can only imagine what he will do to me and to my family if he discovers that the cure did not work perfectly.