The key holds the truth

War." Gorgon spits the word. "That is what they call it to give the illusion of honor and law. It is chaos. Madness and blood and the hunger to win. It has always been thus and shall always be so.

She wished she were as inconsequential as the ghosts in her dreams.

I want to ask him if it’s possible that a girl can be born unlovable, or does she just become that way?

She was too much—for Zenith, Ohio. She’d tried at times to make herself smaller, to fit neatly into the ordered lines of expectation. But somehow, she always managed to say or do something outrageous—she’d accept a dare to climb a flagpole, or make a slightly risqué joke, or go riding in cars with boys—and suddenly she was “that awful O’Neill girl” all over again.

Because it is morning, it is morning, and there is so much to see.

She knew what it was to wait for someone who would never come home. She knew that grief, like a scar, faded but never really went away.