36 Quotes by Stephanie Oakes

I figure out they’re not making me new hands. They can’t do that, the doctor says like I’m slow, and I turn away to glare at the wall, eyes burning. Growing up, I believed in miracles. I guess I don’t anymore.

I am a blood-soaked girl.

Did he say anything interesting?” I ask. “A revelation that the Lord is reborn in a chicken nugget, maybe?

The worst crime you can do to yourself is to forget why you chose the path you’re on, but keep walking down it anyway.

The Prophet saw him waver, too. He clamped his hand heavily against my father’s shoulder. “DO IT!” he bellowed. “DO IT NOW!” My father raised the hatchet above his head. It wobbled there, breath passing his chapped lips in ragged waves. He jammed his eyes shut as he brought the hatchet down and punched it into my wrists.

I replay the scene again and again, the broken mashed-up face looming over me, the knowledge between the two of us that I’d done it. That act of kindness is still more unfathomable to me than any cruelty.

It is amazing that, though I am small and ungifted and barely educated, even I can appreciate the scale of the universe. And from this perch in space, for this moment at least, it seems unimportant whether someone made it, or if it made itself.

God’s real name is Charlie, he told us. He was born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1776, in the summer of the signing, when temperatures were high as rockets and humid as seas.

Crime is never preventable because the mind will always grow bored.