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21 " True, I only properly started talking with Todd half an hour ago, but every instance of undying love was only half an hour young, once upon a time. "
― David Mitchell , Slade House
22 " People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you "
23 " we’ll never give up, never stop looking. Always I wonder. Sometimes I envy the weeping parents of the definitely dead you see on TV. Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. "
24 " No one’s ever very sure if doves and pigeons are the same bird or not. "
25 " The only explanation is that my senses, memory, and mind are conspiring against my well-being, and nothing’s scarier than that. "
26 " It’s cold and clammy in the alley like White Scar Cave in the Yorkshire Dales. Dad took me when I was ten. I find a dead cat lying on the ground at the first corner. It’s gray like dust on the moon. I know it’s dead because it’s as still as a dropped bag, and because big flies are drinking from its eyes. How did it die? There’s no bullet wound or fang marks, though its head’s at a slumped angle so maybe it was strangled by a cat-strangler. It goes straight into the Top Five of the Most Beautiful Things I’ve Ever Seen. Maybe there’s a tribe in Papua New Guinea who think the droning of flies is music. Maybe I’d fit in with them. “Come along, Nathan.” Mum’s tugging my sleeve. "
27 " A dragonfly settles on a bulrush an inch from my nose. Its wings are like cellophane and Jonah says, “Its wings are like cellophane,” and I say, “I was just thinking that,” but Jonah says, “Just thinking what?” so maybe I just thought he’d said it. Valium rubs out speech marks and pops thought-bubbles. I’ve noticed it before. "
28 " Places change you, Miss Timms, and deserts change us pale northerners so much, our own mothers wouldn’t recognize us. "
29 " Her professional conscience is a collar. I hold the leash. "
30 " When you die, your soul crosses the Dusk between life and the Blank Sea. The journey takes forty-nine days, "
31 " She didn’t tell me to use a condom, so I didn’t: a bit of a risk, but it’s her risk, not mine, "
32 " Grief’s a bastard, it really is—pardon my French. It makes everything else harder. "
33 " Other boys mean questions have to get settled. Who’s coolest? Who’s hardest? Who’s brainiest? Normal boys care about this stuff "
34 " If you don’t fit into the system, the system makes life hell. "
35 " Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes “I woke up and it was all a dream” at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it’s a cop-out, it’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf. "
36 " I’m not in the Scouts any more,’ I remind her. Mr Moody our scoutmaster told me to get lost, so I did, and it took the Snowdonia mountain rescue service two days to find my shelter. I’d been on the local news and everything. Everyone was angry, but I was only following orders. "
37 " The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven "
38 " Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes "I woke up and it was all a dream" at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it's a cop-out, it's the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream. "
39 " Do you ever think you might be a different species of human, knitted out of raw DNA in a laboratory like in The Island of Doctor Moreau, and then turned loose to see if you can pass yourself off as normal or not? "
40 " Truth has this habit of changing after the fact, don't you find? "