You've learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks lies.

What's your name?" "Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?" "Wanted." "By all the girls or just the law?

He wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you'd been born for only one moment and this, for whatever reason, was it.

You've learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks lies.

Your first family is your blood family and you always be true to that. That means something. But there's another family and that's the kind you go out and find. Maybe even by accident sometimes. And they're as much blood as your first family. Maybe more so, because they don't have to look out for you and they don't have to love you. They choose to.

I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn't raise the gun to my head fast enough.

Which would be worse - to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?