We leave Pippa behind, standing in the dark, teeming bowels of the camp, while the sun begins to stain the sky electric, and from all sides the guns draw closer.

It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me - such bullshit.

What is beauty? Beauty is no more than a trick; a delusion; the influence of excited particles and electrons colliding in your eyes, jostling in your brain like a bunch of overeager school children, about to be released on break. Will you let yourself be deluded? Will you let yourself be decieved? -"On Beauty and Falsehood," The New Philosophy, by Ellen Dorpshire

I want to be healed and whole and perfect again, like a misshapen slab of iron that comes out of the fire glowing, glittering, razor-sharp.

No guest rooms.” I shake my head resolutely. “I want to be in a room room. A lived-in room.

Amor deliria nervosa: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. Symptom number twelve.

We’ll go.” Her voice is surprisingly deep and forceful. Set in her sunken, shipwreck face, her eyes burn like two smoldering coals. “We’ll fight.