Victoria Schwab

The worse thing you can do in a fight is stop moving. When someone attacks, they create force, movement, momentum, but you'll be okay as long as you can see and feel the direction of that force and travel with it.

Imagine a place where the dead rest on shelves like books.

We do it, Jackson, because compassion must be louder than pride.

There are no monsters in the dark.

The only way to truly record a person is not in words, not in still frames, but in bone and skin and memory.

Everything hurts. I don't know how to make it stop. It hurts when I breathe. It hurts when I think. I feel like I'm drowning, and it's my fault, and I don't know how to be okay. I don't know if I CAN be okay. I don't know if I should be allowed to be okay.

Wesley's touch lingers on my skin. His music echoes through my head. I remind myself as I scrub my skin that we are both liars and con artists. That we will always have secrets, some that bind us and some that cut between us, slicing us into pieces.

Doubt is like a current you have to swim against, one that saps your strength.

But the fact is, dreams catch us with our armor off.

Everything that rises will fall. Empires, societies, governments. None of them lasts forever. Why? Because even though they are the products of change, they become resistant to change. The longer a society survives, the more it clings to its power, and the more it resists progress. The more it resists progress- resists change- the more its ciizens demand it. In response, the society tighten its grip, desperate to maintain control. It's afraid of losing its hold.

I am Sunai,_ he said. __ am holy fire. And if I have to burn the world to cleanse it, so help me, I will.

...something more than the sum of its parts-

You really are like him, your father.""I can't tell whether you think that's good or bad.""What does it matter? It's simply true.

Lying is easy. But it's lonely.""What do you mean?""When you lie to everyone about everything, what's left? What's true?""Nothing," I say."Exactly.

Do you ever wonder why music brings a soul to surface? What makes beauty work as well as pain?

Listen to me,_ he said, pulling off his coat. __ou need to stay awake.__he almost laughed, a shallow chuckle cut short by pain.He tore the lining from the Colton jacket. __hat__ so funny?___ou__e a really shitty monster, August Flynn.

His gaze settles on the discarded book. He leans, reaching until his fingertips graze Dante's Inferno, still on its bed of folded sheets. "What have we here?" he asks."Required reading," I say."It's a shame they do that," he says, thumbing through the pages. "Requirement ruins even the best of books.

Sing you a song and steal your soul.