Did he sprout out of the ground like a mushroom?

They wanted the moon, but they hadn’t realize it cost the earth.

I didn’t know how to explain to him that for all that I still looked young, I had been feeling old. The years had passed, so many of them, and they were starting to wear on me. After a while it wasn’t fun to always feel like you had to have fun. -Jamie.

Adults, Alice reflected, could learn something from the way children bounced back from horror like little rubber balls.

Why is a girl less valuable than a boy?” Amelia asked. She’d heard this before and did not understand it. Did not women bear the next generation? Was not that power more profound than anything a man could do? “Men like to have sons to carry on their name,” Charity said. “They aren’t men otherwise.

It would always be Peter and me, like we were in the beginning.

Red didn’t like to think of herself as a killer, but she wasn’t about to let herself get eaten up just because she was a woman alone in the woods.

Humans, Amelia knew, would do anything for belief. They would proselytize from the highest mountain for belief. They would collect like-minded people and form mobs for belief. They would kill one another for belief.

I was suddenly sorry I’d grown, even if it was only a little, and wished I could be similar again and that it was just Peter and me, running and climbing and laughing, back when the island was ours.

She was not following his script, and he didn’t know how to improvise.