I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn't find me. For me, that place was always inside a book.

I wouldn't know where to start." "He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to." "Thoreau?" "Harry Emerson Fosdick.

You can read minds, and you didn't tell me?” Link stared at me like he just found out I was the Silver Surfer. He rubbed his head nervously. “Hey, man, all that stuff about Lena? I was yankin’ your chain.” He looked away. “Are you doin’ it now? You're doin’ it, aren't you? Dude, get out of my head.” He backed away from me and into the bookshelf. “I can't read your mind, you idiot.

I'm not falling anymore. That's what L says, and she's right. I guess you could say I'm flying. We both are. And I'm pretty sure somewhere up there in the real blue sky and carpenter bee greatness, Amma's flying, too. We all are, depending on how you look at it. Flying or falling, it's up to us. Because the sky isn't really made of blue paint, and there aren't just two kinds of people in this world, the stupid and the stuck. We only think there are. Don't waste your time with either-with anything. It's not worth it.

I watched for her hair to curl, the telltale Caster breeze. It didn't move. This wasn't Caster magic she was working. It was another kind altogether. She couldn't charm her way out from under Macon's watch. She would have to resort to older magic, stronger magic, the kind that had worked best on Macon from the time she first moved to Ravenwood. Plain old love.

A little known fact: I read all the time. books were the one thing that got me out of Gatlin, even if it was only for a little while.

It wasn't that she was different from all the other girls at Jackson. That was obvious. It was that she made me realize how much I was just like the rest of them, even if I wanted to pretend I wasn't.