My magic. That was at the heart of me. It was a manifestation of what I believed, what I lived. It came from my desire to see to it that someone stood between the darkness and the people it would devour.

A bolt of warmth, fierce with joy and pride and gratitude, flashed through me like sudden lightning. I don't care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching-they are your family. And they were my heroes.

My friend is going to save a little girl from monsters. I am going with him. That's what friends do.

Like “love,” “hope” is one of those ridiculously disproportional words that by all rights should be a lot longer.

At the moment I was mad enough to chew up nails and spit out paper clips.

‎It isn't enough to stand up and fight darkness. You've got to stand apart from it, too. You've got to be different from it.

Nearly everyone underestimates how powerful the touch of another person's hand can be. The need to be touched is something so primal, so fundamentally a part of our existence as human beings that its true impact upon us can be difficult to put into words. That power doesn't necessarily have anything to do with sex, either. From the time we are infants, we learn to associate the touch of a human hand with safety, with comfort, with love.