Patrick Ness

I wanted so badly for there to be more. I ached for there to be more than my crappy little life.' He shakes his head. 'And there was more. I just couldn't see it.

Just remember, please, most of that stuff is in the past. It isn't the story I want to tell. At all.You needed to know it, but for the rest of this, I'm choosing my own story.Because if you can't do that, you might as well just give up.

But this, all this, isn't the story I'm trying to tell. This is all past. This is the part of your life where it gets taken over by other people's stories and there's nothing you can do about it except hold on tight and hope you're still alive at the end to take up your own story again. So that's what we did. Me, Mel, and Meredith all moved on, and we're the stories we're living now.Aren't we?

He really is alone in whatever hell this is.Completely and utterly alone.'It isn't,' he thinks, as he trudges back toward his house, 'the most unfamiliar feeling in the world.

No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky__ too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?___nd what if the air tastes of honey? What if there__ so much food we all get too fat? What if the sky is so beautiful we don__ get any work done because we__e all looking at it too much?

Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.

A good idea always attracts other good ideas.

I don't believe in guardian angels," Regine says seriously. "Just people who are there for you and people who aren't.

We stay watching the fire, which probably is just a fire, but we watch it together. Me and my friends. And there'll be a tomorrow, of course there will, when it all begins again, but right now is almost a kind of loop for me, something to feel on the inside of, but this time it's good. It's a loop with my friends that would even be a pretty damn good forever.

There's her silence, loud as a roar, pulling at me like the greatest sadness ever, like I want to take it and press myself into it and just disappear forever down into nothing.What a relief that would feel like right now. What a blessed relief.

Mikey," she says, but not like she's about to say anything more, just like she's identifying me, making a place for me here that's mine to exist in. I want her so much, my heart feels heavy, like I'm grieving. Is this what they meant about that stomach feeling? They didn't say it felt this sad.

He answered the phone to his daughter with a broken but joyous heart, ready to speak with her of astonishment and wonder.

I couldn't stand the waiting anymore. I couldn't stand how alone it made me feel."And a part of you wished it would just end, said the monster, even if it meant losing her.And the nightmare began. The nightmare that always ended with -"I let her go," Conor choked out. "I could have held on but I let her go."And that, the monster said, is the truth."I didn't mean it, though!" Conor said, his voice rising. "I didn't mean to let her go! And now it's for real! Now she's going to die and it's my fault!"And that, the monster said, is not the truth at all.

People see stories everywhere," Regine says. "That's what my father used to say. We take random events and we string them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true." She glances back at Seth. "We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.

Belief is half of healing.

You won't," says the Mayor, smiling again. "Everyone knows you aren't a killer, Todd."He pushes Viola forward again -She calls out from the pain of it -Viola, I t

His noise is getting quieter, but I can still see it there still-See how he feels the skin of my hand against his, see how he wants to take it and press it against his mouth, how he wants to breathe in the smell of me and how beautiful I look to him, how strong after all that illness, and how he wants to just lightly touch my neck, just there, and how he wants to take me in his arms and-"Oh, God," he says, looking away suddenly. "Viola, I'm sorry, I didn't mean-"But I just put my hand to the back of his neck-And he says, "Viola-?"And I pull myself towards him-And I kiss him.And it feels like, finally.

Who is to say that it is not everything else that is the dream?