“You can't tell me I matter and then leave like I don't.”
“I am everything. I am nothing. I am powerful. I am forgotten.”
“Do you know what I thought when you tried to kill me? The first time? I thought, How can somebody want me dead when no one knows I'm alive?”
“Nothing. You know what that feels like. Reach for it. Grab it. Make it yours.”
“And then she was gone, disappearing into the nearby stacks like a rabbit taking to its hole, and he was left with a computer he didn’t know how to use, words he could barely read, and the knowledge that he wasn’t just a killer.
Most of the time, he was a pretty poor excuse for a person, too.”
“They told him he was killing monsters, and then they made him kill people. He thought it was just me who was different, and he didn’t go through with killing me. He thought there was a chance that it wasn’t too late. That everyone he’d killed really had been a dangerous Null. That he really was a hero, working in the shadows to make the world a better place for people who’d never even looked his way. That he wasn’t just an unimportant little boy raised like an animal and let out of the cage only when The Society wanted someone dead.
He wanted to believe that, and he just found out he was wrong.”
“Oh God. I'm jealous of farts.”
“She wasn’t going to sit and wait. She was done waiting, because you could spend your whole life waiting for something to happen. Something big. You could wait and wait, and even if something big happened, even if it finally happened—it didn’t change anything.”
“Someone tried to kill me, and I’m going swimming. I’m going swimming, because it doesn’t matter. I’m going swimming, because I don’t matter. I’m going swimming, because that’s what Claires do. We swim and we daydream and we read and we wait for someone to care, and they never, ever, ever do.”
“Feeling like she really was just seven or eight, Claire sat down on the floor, books all around her, and she opened the last one she’d picked up. Even though it was dark, and even though her eyes couldn’t see the words, she knew them.
Knew the little prince’s story as well as her own.
She closed her eyes. She leaned her head forward against the book. And she sobbed.”
“They were confident and cunning. They weren't mucking around looking for nuclear weapon secret sloppy seconds in America. They could care less about America. They were busy with the whole world domination thing.”
“So one time I said to her that she should stop reading it, because it was just depressing, so she was like, But I want to know what’s going on, so I was like, Then you should do something about it. It’s a free country. You should do something. She was like, Nothing’s ever going to happen in a two-party system. She was like, da da da, nothing’s ever going to change, both parties are in the pocket of big business, da da da, all that? So I was like, You got to believe in the people, it’s a democracy, we can change things.
She was like, It’s not a democracy.”
“Have you been travelling, my young friend? Come in out of the darkness and rain. Sit by the fire, eat, drink and rest yourself. Life is one long journey from beginning to end, you know. We all walk different roads, both with our bodies and our minds. Some of us lose heart and fall by the wayside, whilst others go on to realise their dreams and desires.”
“I don't kick a man when he's down, unless I'm the one who put him down in the first place. I don't put him down unless he deserves it. And I don't break my word if I give it. So I'll give you my word.”
“If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, I hope it lands on a philosophy professor.”
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