We’re all dying, Cassel. It’s just that some of us are dying faster than others.

Even from the beginning, that was the problem. People liked pretty things. People even liked pretty things that wanted to kill and eat them.

Magic gives you a lot of choices," Grandad says. "Most of them are bad.

She suddenly understood why she had let him kiss her in the diner, why she had wanted him at all. She wanted to control him. He was every arrogant boyfriend that had treated her mother badly. He was every boy that told her she was too freaky, who had laughed at her, or just wanted her to shut up and make out. He was a thousand times less real than Roiben.

It's not that I don't know that it's a bad idea. It's that, lately, bad ideas have a particular hold over me.

Sam: You know what I wish? Cassel: What? Sam: That someone would covert my bed into a robot that would fight other bed robots to the death for me.

She loves the serene brutality of the ocean, loves the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air.