-
And there is nothing between us but rain. Then there is nothing between us at all.
-
It's always in the rain...
-
If we don't have that, what do we have to live for? Does it matter if it's a lie if it keeps us alive?
-
Maybe being alone in the sea, with its unexplored depths, its clawing-finger waves, really is safer compared to the land, where there are people and malice and death.
-
Words are powerful things. They can start—or end—wars. People believe in words. They are the fundamental expression of ourselves, the division between human and not, the means by which we learn. And while people use words to teach, to express art, to proclaim truths, at the most basic level, people use words to simply say: I am here.
-
But sometimes I look at Phoebe and I think about how she had a bird inside her heart. On the outside, she’s just like everyone else, but I like to think that maybe she carries within her something magical and free.
-
Our masterpieces are Shakespeare and Jane Austen and griots and Murasaki Shikibu, but they’re also J.K. Rowling and Chuck Palahnuik and Douglas Adams and Amy Tan and Suzanne Collins and Chinua Achebe. Read. Read them all. Read the books you love, and try to read books you don’t. Read the genres you love, but sometimes also read a book outside your comfort zone. Read voraciously.
-
I am as silent as death. Do this: Go to your bedroom. Your nice, safe, warm bedroom that is not a glass coffin behind a morgue door. Lie down on your bed not made of ice. Stick your fingers in your ears. Do you hear that? The pulse of life from your heart, the slow in-and-out from your lungs? Even when you are silent, even when you block out all noise, your body is still a cacophony of life. Mine is not. It is the silence that drives me mad. The silence that drives the nightmares to me. Because what if I am dead? How can someone without a beating heart, without breathing lungs live like I do? I must be dead. And this is my greatest fear: After 301 years, when they pull my glass coffin from this morgue, and they let my body thaw like chicken meat on the kitchen counter, I will be just like I am now. I will spend all of eternity trapped in my dead body. There is nothing beyond this. I will be locked within myself forever. And I want to scream. I want to throw open my eyes wake up and not be alone with myself anymore, but I can't. I can't.
-
I think death is easier than guilt sometimes.
-
I can't be the kind of leader you want me to. I will never, ever be the kind of leader you want me to be. And I will be better because of it.
-
Holding Amy against me, I realize the simple truth is that power isn't control at all - power is strength, and giving that strength to others.
-
But how can I be disappointed in space?
-
More than the sound of my own beating heart, I miss the sound of a ticking clock. Time passes, it must pass, but I have no more assurance of moving through time than I have that I am moving through space. In a way, I’m glad: this means perhaps 300 years and 364 days have passed, and tomorrow I will wake up. Sometimes after a cross-country meet or a long day at school, I’d fall into bed with all my clothes on and be out before I knew it. When I’d finally open my eyes, it would feel like I’d just shut them for a minute, but really, the whole rest of the day and half the night was gone. But. There were other times when I’d collapse onto my mattress, shut my eyes and dream, and it felt like I’d lived a whole lifetime in that dream, but when I woke up, it had only been a few minutes. What if only a year has gone by? What if we haven’t even left yet? That is my greatest fear.
-
I lean closer to him, so close I can smell his skin, and when I speak, I can see how the little hairs near his ear move with my breath. "I also want you to know that I won't kill you right away. But that you'll wish I had.
-
We are, at least in part, who we remember ourselves to be. Take away our memories, and you take away our selves.
-
But...If my life on Earth must end, let it end with a promise. Let it end with hope.
-
It was to apologize, and apologizing means he remembers what happened, and that means being trapped in a nightmare that’s already come true.
-
Of everyone on this ship, even the frozen bodies of my parents, Elder's the only one who handed me truth and waited for me to accept it.
-
We fall into each other. All the other voices in my head--the fear, the doubt, the worry--are drowned out. I die at the end of each kiss and am brought gasping back to life at the beginning of the next. I close my eyes and the entire world fades away.
-
When I look at the fields, all I can see is how fake they are, how poor an imitation they are of the pictures of Sol-Earth fields. And that's why I'll never be as good an Eldest as he is. Because I like a little chaos.
-
People will survive anything for their children.
-
A splatter of rain on my skin, but its bright and sunny under the blue sky and Jason's there, and we almost kiss but everything changes and were at that party where we met.
-
I realize the simple truth is that power isn’t control at all- power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn’t someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others so that they may have the strength to stand on their own.
-
Remember that time I punched you in front of my father’s grave?” I ask in a sentimental voice.