Whereas the town knows all about you already and wants to know more and wants to beat you with what it knows till how can you have any of yourself left at all?

And if one day,' she said, really crying now, 'you look back and you feel bad for being so angry, if you feel bad for being so angry at me that you couldn't even speak to me, then you have to know, Conor, you have to that is was okay. It was okay. That I knew. I know, okay? I know everything you need to tell me without you having to say it out loud.

Stories are important...They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.

If you ever see a war," she says, not looking up from her clipboard, "you'll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors.

People see stories everywhere...We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true...We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.

So who are you then, Todd Hewitt?" he says. "What makes you so special?" Now that, I think, is a very good asking.

As destruction goes, the monster said behind him, this is all remarkably pitiful.