Quotes by Lauren DeStefano

Were all born an empty page.

His lips are familiar. I know the shape of them, know how to make mine fit against them. His taste is familiar too. For all the illusions and colors and sweet smells... he has always tasted like skin. His breaths are shallow. Im holding his life against my tongue, between my rows of teeth. Hes offering it up.

Pram wasnt told the story of her birth. But even as a very small girl, she felt deep in her chest that she was alive and dead at the same time.

There’s this anomaly that happens sometimes with twins. It occurs in the womb when the fetuses are growing too closely to each other. The stronger twin develops normally, while the weaker twin crumples and is encased by the body of the stronger twin, where it becomes a parasite. The result is a single child, plagued by a twin-shaped fossil inside. Like a tumor.In death Rose became Linden’s parasitic twin. They were two separate organisms once, growing steadily beside each other. Two pulses. Two brains. But she has crumpled and died, and still he carries her inside himself. She goes where he goes, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, a shadow behind his ribs.

I watch the ashes swim around like dandelion puffs, making swirls where bodies and walls once stood.

I think shes brave. I think that nobody has ever believed what she could be capable of. All her life, nobody was listening.

There is a dark place calling to me, but I will not go just yet. I know I cant return from it.

Theyre making me go to school, Pram said. I dont think its a very good idea. Ive read about how cruel kids can be.Are you afraid theyll be cruel, or that being around them for too long will make you cruel? Felix said.Both, I suppose.

A feeling cant kill you.

She smiles at our husband as she moves, and he blushes, overcome by her beauty. But I know what her smile really means...Her smile is her revenge.

Stone gnomes and angels filled the gardens, and it seemed that they were also sleeping, as though a witch had cast a spell on them.

Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky.

When were alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, its as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.

Maybe it is desperation, I say. Maybe we cant let things fall apart without trying. We cant let go of the people we love.He looks at me, and in the sunlight his eyes come alive with greens and golds. Sometimes we can, he says.

Theyre dead. Were alive. We have things to do.

But there’s no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.

Ah, love. That’s what the world has lost. There’s no more love, only the illusion of it.

Its best to let her go, he says.No, no, thats wrong. Its never right to give up on someone.

‎I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that Im touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again.

He talks softly, patiently, as I sit on the window ledge and watch boats with colorful triangles for sails scratch the ocean.