It won't matter if nobody ever thinks I'm pretty (although sometimes I wish, just for a second, that somebody would)

But how could anyone who's ever seen a summer - big explosion of green and skies lit up electric with splashy sunsets, a riot of flowers and wind that smells like honey - pick the snow?

It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.

I used to think that's what love was: knowing someone so well he was like a part of you.

That’s what made it so frightening to the lawmakers: Love obeys no laws other than its own.

Raven jerks and stiffens. For a second, I think she is only surprised: Her mouth goes round, her eyes wide. Then she begins teetering backward, and I know that she is dead. Falling, falling, falling . . .

It's surprisingly nice out here, peaceful and pretty-strange to be standing in the middle of a little garden while enclosed by the massive stone walls of the prison, like being at the exact center of a hurricane, and finding peace and silence in the middle of so much shrieking damage.