Release

They're your parents. They're meant to love you because. Never in spite.

It was so much easier to be loved than to have to do any of the desperate work of loving.

Never pass up the chance to be kissing someone. It's the worst kind of regret.

Blame is a human concept, one of its blackest and most selfish and self-binding.

Little girls aren't naturally lost," Karen said, frowning as she scanned saucepans. "Someone makes them that way.

It may cost you, my Queen. It may cost you dear." "All the best journeys do, faun.

Blame is something that is shared and denied in equal measures.

If you can't pray it away, it's not a real problem.

Tread carefully, Marty. I mean it. The world has completely changed around you while you weren't looking.

Marty: Dad's right about you. You got lost on your journey somewhere. Adam: That's what everyone says who never bothered to go on a journey in the first place.

And there. The power of a word. The power of one word. That's where it all changes.

People with really stiff morals are easier to tip over.

Maybe there didn’t have to be any other reasons. Maybe love made you stupid. Maybe loneliness did.

Raising his eyes to look directly into Linus's face was maybe the scariest thing he'd had to do all day long, but it was only the free-falling terror that always accompanied hope.

Adam’s stomach was tumbling with how much Linus knew and how he’d found it all out (it would turn out he knew as much as nearly everyone else in the school, which was a lot, but it also turned out that – in that unreachable, possible world – most of them actually liked Adam or at least didn’t actively wish him harm, so they’d given his sorrow some space; when Adam thought about it now, it still made his head swim, still made him blush, still made him wish he could crawl under a blanket and die there forever) – but looking at Linus, he saw no malice, no gossip, saw instead someone who might actually know.

She can smell him now, a smudge of unwashed skin, poverty, extreme loneliness. She takes the can, still holding his hand, unrolling it, running a finger across its weathered palm.

Why did everyone no longer a teenager automatically dismiss any feeling you had then? Who cared if he’d grow out of it? That didn’t make it any less true in those painful and euphoric days when it was happening.

If she needed him, he'd be there instantly, no questions asked, and he knew she'd do the same. She was here now. They had their bulgogi. This is what a family was. Or should be.

Never pass up the chance to be kissing someone. It’s the worst kind of regret.

But here, now, again, this was more than the body, or the mind, or the personality. It wasn't holy, that was a whole other mess, but it was something that could be touched only here.

But then she thinks, feels, reaches out, and knowing exactly what blame is - a human construct, one of its blackest and more selfish and self-blinding - she can find further strands of it, emanating in all directions, for blame is something that is shared but denied in equal measure.

an act that didn't feel like penetration, but like combination