"I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing."
- Brenna Yovanoff
"My father gave me a ruined boy to compensate for the fact that he does not love me. The boy is fragile, broken—broke himself—broke everything.I asked him why he did it. He said because the world was u..."
"I had only to remember that centuries before, men fell in battle for the daughter of Troy, that passions carried greater weight than decorum. It took so little to prove that human life and property ar..."
"The new mythology of love was that it bent to the fashion of the day, obligated to take the shape of doves, lilies, jewels. This is a lie. Love is sometimes as passionate as war."
"He is broken in three ways, sometimes four. I count them.-He believes himself to be human, but is not actually. At least not anymore. This is similar to the way he believes himself to be alive.-He has..."
"Tender," she said again. "Tender is kind and gentle. It's also sore, like the skin around an injury."
"In his youth, he was electrified. The stars were moving in his bloodstream. He would not have been cowed by the customs of an earthly monarch. When he loved, it was with a heat and a desperation that ..."
"That was the thing about being bereaved. People were overcome with sympathy. They did things for you without even considering whether or not it was the right thing to do."
"Her gaze was direct, full of a sadness so raw and crystallized that I could see the shape of it. It ringed her pupils in rusty starbursts, but she was grinning--this terrible, ferocious grin. It made ..."
"Our whole lives, it was like we were always trying so hard to be perfect - for our families and our friends, for each other - when the funny thing was, we didn't have to. In the end, we were better th..."