"She stops speaking, but I can hear her silent sobs. They’re the loudest thing I’ve ever heard."
"She is trying to control me with fear, because she cannot control me any other way.My eyes open wide. They burn as if they are on fire—no, as if they are made of fire. Eyes are the window to the soul."
"Family is never really gone."
"It’s all in my mind.I’m in my right mind now, and my right mind is crazy."You need to wake up, Ella."The words are a command I cannot obey."
"And this is what she wants to do to people. Let them have their own lives, until she wants them. Give them the strength of giants, but not the power to control it."
"As soon as I say the words, I know they were the right ones. My eyes dip down to Dad’s memorial plaque. Truth doesn’t lie in the heart of fortune… it’s under Triumph Towers, where the labs are."
"And I try to remember if this happened before, because this is a memory I would want to keep.But there is no echo of it in my mind."
"We are, at least in part, who we remember ourselves to be. Take away our memories, and you take away our selves."
"It was to apologize, and apologizing means he remembers what happened, and that means being trapped in a nightmare that’s already come true."
"I have no emotions. I just stand there, in the rubble of my life.This… this was my home. If it were a person, this would be a gaping chest wound, the kind no one can recover from."
"I reached inside her and pulled out the deepest memories in her body, the memories that words can’t describe, the memories that are as much a piece of her as her arms and legs. Those are the ones she’s filled with now."
"The freedom of our people is more important!” Julie says fiercely. “We will never stop fighting, never stop working for what is right!”Jack just smiles at her. “That’s a nice lie to believe,” he says."
"I try not to look obvious as I wait for Mom’s answer. I feel as if I am on the edge of a knife, my feet being sliced by the blade, teetering toward one side or the other.“Oh, of course!” Mom exclaims, her voice trilling with laughter. “How could I have forgotten?”And now I know. Really know. This woman is not my mother. I don’t know who she is, but I know absolutely who she is not."
"I have emotions,” I whisper. I am nothing but a black hole of emotions."
"If I can only see him in madness, is it worth trying to hold onto sanity?"
"Ella!" the voice yells, but I cannot tell where it is coming from. The sound wraps around me, spreading like spilt water and then evaporating into silence."
"I cannot imagine a more perfect hell than being trapped inside my own mind."
"How ironic it would be, to die at his hands while trying to save him, when he first came to me because he was trying to save me."
"When you wake up, your face will be dry. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t cry."
"I wish you were here,” I say, shutting my eyes and remembering the way Dad looked in my hallucination.I hear his voice again, so real that I’m worried I’m about to fall into another hallucination. Maybe that’s what I really want. If I can only see him in madness, is it worth trying to hold onto sanity?"
"My heart stutters—not why? or how?—those are not the important questions. The really important question is: by whom?"