I've managed to stay alive out here in the Ruin because I'm a realist. I allow the truth to be the truth, no matter how much I might want it to be something else.

It's just that I'm fifteen, and I have this crazy idea I might actually have a life in front of me. I don't see how it's going to do me much good to believe that the world is over and this is just an epilogue.

A wise man once said that we can't make anyone feel or do anything. We can throw things into the wind, but it's up to each person to decide how they want to react, where they want to stand when things fall.

Guilt and rage, hatred and fear were pathways to weakness and clumsy choices.

Sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage.

There are moments that define a person's whole life. Moments in which everything they are and everything they may possibly become balance on a single decision. Life and death, hope and despair, victory and failure teeter precariously on the decision made at that moment. These are moments ungoverned by happenstance, untroubled by luck. These are the moments in which a person earns the right to live, or not.

It's important to know the past, but your survival depends on knowing the present.