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21 " You're not actually falling for him, are you?" he asks her one day, on one of the rare occasions he can get her alone." I'll pretend you didn't just ask that," she tells him in disgust. But Connor has reasons to wonder." On that first night here, he offered you his blanket, and you accepted it," he points out." Only because I knew it would make him cold." " And when he offers you his food, you take it." " Because it means he goes hungry." It's coolly logical. Connor finds it amazing that she can put her emotions aside and be as calculating as Roland, beating him at his own game. Another reason for Connor to admire her. "
22 " I've never been this naked with a girl before. I'm not self-conscious or anything, but its different. Not weird. I'm definitely all right with Hayles seeing this much of me. " Wowza." Okay, now I'm a little embarrassed. " Is that a good thing?" She puts her hands on my chest and her face goes from pink to red. (...) " Seriously? Brody, this is totally another reason why you're just super fabulous." Huh?" You don't even know how freaking hot you are. That's uber sexy." Her eyes go to my bare torso. " Count with me." One finger strokes part of my stomach. " One..." She moves an inch or two over. " Two..." She slides down. " Three..." Back over. " Four..." Down. " Five..." Over. " Six." She flicks her gaze back up to me. " That's what people call a six-pack." I roll my eyes, but she keeps moving her fingers up to my chest. I want to stop her, but I don't at the same time. It feels too good. " And these..." She flattens her hands on me, and I tug her closer. " Are called pecs. Its like you stepped out of a fantasy. "
23 " I’ve always resented the word maturity, primarily, I think, because it is most often used as a club. If you do something that someone doesn’t like, you lack maturity, regardless of the actual merits of your action. Too, it seems to me that what is most often called maturity is nothing more than disengagement from life. If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn’t, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those “mature” people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures. This has never appealed to me and that is another reason I could never accept the common image of maturity that was presented to me.It was only after I came back from Trial that I came to a notion of my own as to what maturity consists of. Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with. It is easy now to see the irrelevance of the religious wars of the past, to see that capitalism in itself is not evil, to see that honor is most often a silly thing to kill a man for, to see that national patriotism should have meant nothing in the twenty-first century, to see that a correctly-arranged tie has very little to do with true social worth. It is harder to assess as critically the insanities of your own time, especially if you have accepted them unquestioningly for as long as you can remember, for as long as you have been alive. If you never make the attempt, whatever else you are, you are not mature. "
― Alexei Panshin , Rite of Passage
24 " We both know that I will not come. We both know that he won't be in Canada. There will be another earthquake, another flood, another war, another reason to not go where we think we are going. It is a strange life, this. Chasing human misery around the planet. We are not the sort of people who go where we say we are going. "
― Kelsey Hoppe , Chasing Misery: an anthology of essays by women in humanitarian responses