Margaret Atwood

Why is war so much like a practical joke? she thinks. Hiding behind bushes, leaping out, with not much difference between Boo! and Bang! except the blood.

“Life is warped. I'm just in sync.”

“Gender roles suck," says Swift Fox. Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.

Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic.

time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float.

Glenn used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, “I’ll be dead,” you’ve said the word I, and so you’re still alive inside the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul — it was a consequence of grammar.

“It's better to hope than mope!”

“But hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. Once you've had a little, you start shaking if you don't get more.”

There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

“I am not my childhood," Snowman says out loud.

You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”