About my first memory, sitting on the shoulders of a giant who I know can only be my father. Of touching the sky. Of lying between two people who read me stories of wild things and journeys with dragons, the soft hum of their voices speaking of love and serenity. See, I remember love.

Do I have to be here to belong to you?' Froi asked. 'Can't I belong to you wherever I am?

So between you and me," I tell Justine on the phone that night, "we're either bitchy or stupid." "Oh God," she moans. "Everyone thinks I'm an idiot." "Thanks!

you grab at any sign of hope. You grab it with both hands and breathe life into it, day after day. You do anything to keep it alive.

Sir Topher finally looked up. “Because any hope beyond that, my boy, would be too much. I feared we would drown in it.” "Then I choose to drown,” Finnikin said. “In hope. Rather than float into nothing.

It still amazes him how they could have been misled by her personality in Year Eleven. It's what depression does to a person, it changes them completely.

And then their voices stopped and their souls stood still and they ceased being who they had been. Because who they were had always been determined by him.