The steam trains crossed the country, the gleaming tracks clumsy sutures across wounded miles of stolen land.
Trust me: If God exists, he’ll know I’m faking it.
When people talked about “family” as something special, a place where you belonged, a dull anger nipped at Henry, a feeling that he’d been cheated of this basic comfort.
Mabel’s parents had said that it was bigotry dressed up to look like science.
It had been a thudding bore of a day; rain had kept Evie inside at the museum, where she amused herself by rearranging the books on one shelf according to a taxonomy only she understood.
Maybe he would kill one of them for fun. Maybe not. Mood was everything.
I’m tired of everyone deciding what’s for my own good!
See, that’s your generation all over-you muck up everything and then expect us to fix your messes.
You know who’s getting hurt? Workers. Poor people. Immigrants. Every day. It’s a rigged game, Evie. The people at the top say they believe in the people at the bottom until those people try to climb up. And then the people at the top step on the hands of the climbing people they claim to believe in and cast them down the ladder.
Oh, Evie, you’re too much,′ people said, and it wasn’t complementary. Yes, she was too much. She felt like too much inside all the time.
People who were helpful and indispensable were loved. Weren’t they?
He imagined that one day he’d hear that his parents were gone and feel only a vague sense of loss. How could you mourn something you’d never really had?
He’d gone goofy for her, and if she broke his heart, that would be the end of the best friendship he’d ever had. He couldn’t risk that.
I’ve spent the last two hours worried that you were bleeding to death in a ditch,” Evie continued. “Now that I know you’re okay, I just want you to be bleeding to death in a ditch.
Small acts of resistance matter!
If you did the wrong things for the right reasons, did that make the wrong things right? Or did that just mean you had turned your back on finding a more right way? And once you justified violence, did that make it easier the next time and the next, until you’d become the villain of your own story?
Isaiah thought of Memphis in love with Theta and Theta in love with Memphis, and he understood for the first time just how dangerous their love was for them. Even though they were supposed to be free, they weren’t.
Can I tell you a secret? I don’t like ghosts very much. They are terrible people.
You don’t have to disprove someone’s claim if you can discredit the person saying it.
Little Warrior: You can do this. I believe you can.
It was Mabel Evie called when she got back. Mabel who came to her side, even though it was very early in the morning.