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1 " He stepped off the pavement like a man jumping off a bridge, as calm as a swimmer with an ocean out below. Lucy had known what he was going to do the instant their eyes met. She'd know what he intended because she would have done the very same thing if she'd had his courage. Nothing was going to break his fall. "
― Alice Hoffman , The Third Angel
2 " He's nothing fierce or terrible or filled with light. He's like us, sometimes we can't even tell him apart. Sometimes we're the ones who try to save him. He's there to show us who we are. Human beings aren't gods. We makes mistakes. "
3 " That was the way illness appeared in a house, in the corners, in between floorboards, on the hooks in the closet, along with the sweaters and coats. "
4 " Love is ancient and mysterious and you can't mess with it. If you do it just backfires and you meet with disaster. "
5 " People say there's the Angel of Life and the Angel of Death, but there's another one, too. The one who walks among us.'He could tell that she was listening.'He's nothing fierce or terrible or filled with light. He's like us, sometimes we can't even tell him apart. Sometimes we're the ones who try to save him. He's there to show us who we are. Human beings aren't Gods. We make mistakes. "
6 " But at long last she had some privacy and could go more than ten minutes without someone getting in her business, informing her that everything she did was wrong. As if she didn't already know that. "
7 " Love wasn't rational; there was no proof that it even existed outside of people's imaginings. "
8 " To love someone so complicated you had to be committed to a single emotion—the way you loved him—no matter what. In that way, it was indeed simple. "
9 " Mrs. Jones leaned in close. She smelled of wool and peppermint. "There's a man somewhere who wanted you to believe in something... "
10 " Some of the guys he knew said the only people who didn't fear death were those who had nothing to lose and he thought they were probably right. "
11 " He wasn't the first man she'd been with, and that hadn't been Bill back home either. It had been a boy she met on holiday when she was fifteen. She had decided it was time for her to have sex, the way someone else might decide it was time to get a driver's license, and she'd gone ahead with it. Pragmatic, that's the way she'd always been. "
12 " but inside she was broken, made of bones and black ribbons, blood and darkness. "
13 " She thought that some people were like stories rather than whole books—at least the ones you never saw again. With people like that, you never knew what the real ending was. "
14 " She did believe in one thing, something so vast and deep she couldn't bring herself to tell John, even though it was probably safe to confide in someone she would never see again. She believed that people could lose themselves. "
15 " She had even considered that poetry might be her calling. She had something inside her no one understood, that much was certain, and that sort of isolation often led to a poet's life. "
16 " Well, everyone made assumptions, didn't they? Everyone thought they knew her when they knew nothing at all. She had wanted a bigger life, something spectacular, and now here she was in London, much to her parents' dismay up in Reading. She was a small-town girl who desperately wanted a big-city life. That's the story of a mouse, her father had told her. Not of a bright, talented woman who should be in university. "
17 " Lucy Green couldn't stop reading. She was a secret reader... "
18 " ... in the garden where the lilacs were so tall it was impossible to see the road. The leaves were dusty, the way they always were in August when the weather turned hot. "
