How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.

She had never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess.

and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.

Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence.

There's no way to explain to a child that the line between good and evil isn't nearly as black and white as a fairy tale would lead you to believe. That an ordinary person can turn into a villain, under the right circumstances. That sometimes we dragon slayers do things we aren't proud of.

I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

Did you ever wonder if the person in the picture is the same one you see when you look in the mirror?" - "That's the eternal question, isn't it? Are we born who we are, or do we make ourselves that way?