Calculated Risks

Realism and actual reality have never had more than a passing acquaintance anyway.

I don’t want to be a monster. I refuse to be a monster. I am a person, and people get to make our own choices about whether or not we bare our claws.

The laws of physics in this universe are fucked," she said, with far more glee than I felt appropriate under the circumstances.

I knew better than to argue with a teenager who was determined to be unhappy. It never ends well, not for the adult or for the teen.

the family you build matters more than the one you’re born to,

Talking mice,” said Mark, who felt as puzzled as he sounded. “You’re worshipped by talking mice. Jesus, you people are like a fucked-up Disney movie in more ways than one.

like what happens when Seymour from Little Shop is allowed to hook up with Jordan from Real Genius. And if you got both those references, odds are good that you’re a nerd,

Being a telepath in a non-telepathic society is a great way to learn how much you don’t like people or ever want to be around them if you have any choice in the matter, FYI.

Spending time with a telepath means your epiphanies are never as private as you think they are.

Everyone makes mistakes. It’s what you do afterward that makes the difference between good and evil.

Somehow a mountain of corpses with my face didn’t make me feel any better about the situation.

Hyper-religious sapient rodents who worship the Price family as gods.

She smiled shyly, and the world was different, in the way it only ever can be for children meeting the people who will be important for the rest of their lives.

Not that she thought most teenagers were secretly yearning to kill everyone around them and salt the ashes, but it was a theory, if nothing else.

mad at our parents, and that was a much bigger, more complicated kind of anger to carry around.

You put in all that work to grow a second skeleton and then someone just takes it without so much as a “by your leave.

with a death wish broader than the River Styx

It’s called “formative trauma” for a reason: no child should have to see or experience the things that some of these kids had seen, but those things happened. They had the right to retain their own lives as long as they wanted to, and if they wanted the memories gone later, that could happen.

until it became a distant throb, still big enough to eat the world, absolutely, but manageable, no more than an annoyance.

No matter what else happened here today, the giant spider trusted me completely.

The difference between sacrifice and slaughter is consent.

Something touched my hair. It was light, nonaggressive, putting out about as much pressure as a mother cat cleaning her kittens.

They fought a war and proved themselves the worst kind of victor: the kind who turns a victory into a genocide.

Sometimes “easy” isn’t the same thing as “right.