“Esther so badly wanted to save her father, to bring him back from the half death that had become his life. Every time he reminded her that he couldn’t be saved, Esther’s heart broke a little more.”

“...Tell me you believe that our lives are anything more than a ridiculous cascade of random chances.”

“We were characters out of a movie. We were thoroughly alive. And we were absolutely beautiful.”

“Maybe Dracula wasn't a vampire, just a raging alcoholic who was constantly hungover.”

“I know you want her back, kid. And I know that people saying things like 'there are plenty more fish in the sea' is only going to make you hurt more. And I could tell you all about the science of what your brain is going through right now. How it's processing a pain as intense as hitting a nerve in your tooth, but it can't find a source for that pain, so you kind of feel it everywhere. I could tell you that when you fall for someone, the bits of your brain that light up are the same as when you're hungry or thirsty. And I could tell you that when the person you love leaves you, you starve for them, you crave them, Heartbreak is a science, like love. So trust me when I say this: you're wounded right now, but you'll heal.”

“Lola and I both highly believed in the value of metaphorical gifts, so while everyone else saw a demonic-looking cat skeleton dripping wax on the packaging, Lola saw the message: Our friendship is like this feline shaped candle - burn away all the shit, and you and me are still solid underneath. Always.”

“I can’t lie to you and tell you that standing in front of someone and offering them your soul and having them reject you is not gonna be one of the worst things that ever happens to you. You will wonder for days or weeks or months or years afterward what it is about you that was so wrong or broken or ugly that they couldn’t love you the way you loved them. You will look for all the reasons inside yourself that they didn’t want you and you will find a million.Maybe it was the way you looked in the mornings when you first woke up and hadn’t showered. Maybe it was the way you were too available, because despite what everyone says, playing hard to get is still attractive.Some days you will believe that every atom of your being is defective somehow. What you need to remember, as I remembered as I watched Grace Town leave, is that you are extraordinary.”

“Esther wanted to make her brother understand that he was the sun. That he was bright and burning and brilliant, and without his warmth, without his gravity to orient herself around, she would be nothing. She wished they had that psychic twin thing, that she could push images into his head and make him see. Make him see that he was everything.”

“One day,” he said, “everybody’s gonna wake up and realize their parents are human beings, just like them. Sometimes they’re good people, sometimes they’re not.”

“How could death not be appealing, when the only thing that gave him comfort in life was being unconscious?”

“The magic had started to degrade, and Rosemary had slowly but surely become thoroughly, gruesomely human. And there were few things worse in this world than humans.”