The world seems so clean if you only looked up.

Poor kid,' Jenna says, and rolls her eyes toward me for a moment. Then she returns to her book. 'She doesn't even understand what kind of place this is.

We accept gods that don't speak to us. We accept gods that would place us in a world filled with injustices and do nothing as we struggle. It's easier than accepting that there's nothing out there at all, and that, in our darkest moments, we are truly alone.

I wanted to be rid of him," he says. He raises my chin with his thumb. "But not if it meant being rid of you. I climbed in beside you, and you put your head in my lap. You can't think I would have left you like that." "Look what it got you," I say. "Tea in bed and you here in front of me," he says. "It was a terrible decision, and I confess I'd make it again.

Life is much different from the days when there were lilies in my mother’s garden, and all my secrets fit into a paper cup.

Words like 'unputdownable' and 'irresistible' are simply not enough for Cat Winters's In the Shadow of Blackbirds. Days after finishing this story, it remains the first thought I have in the morning, and the thing that haunts me until I sleep.

There's a sort of dead passion in him. A spark that, had he more years to live, would be a wildfire.