“I’ve been locked up for 264 days.”

“The screw through Cinder’s ankle had rusted, the engraved cross marks worn to a mangled circle.”

“There is one mirror in my house. It is behind a sliding panel in the hallway upstairs. Our faction allows me to stand in front of it on the second day of every third month, the day my mother cuts my hair.”

“My big brother reaches home in the dark hours before dawn, when even ghosts take their rest.”

“This is the file that almost killed me, Director.”

“Newborn #485GA18M died on June 30, 2076, at 6:07 in the morning. She was three days old. The average lifespan of a human child, in the time since the break, was fifty-six hours.”

“I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.”

“One summer night I fell asleep, hoping the world would be different when I woke. In the morning, when I opened my eyes, the world was the same.”

“Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that she would kill her true love.”

“At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River High School, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time–between 12:37 P.M. and 1:14 P.M.–by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn’t even begin to identify them.”

“You can hear a miracle a long way after dark.”

“I make sure to sit where they can’t see me. From where I’m perched, tucked just out of sight on a pile of rubble, I have a pretty good view of the other sin-eaters, the aki.”

“I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one.”

“I am Mary Iris Malone, and I am not okay.”

“Joost had two problems: the moon and his mustache.”

“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”

“In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.”

“They said the only folk who belonged in Deadshot after dark were the ones who were up to no good.”

“Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.”