The Carnivorous Flamingo

...the category of books about teenagers with problems—drugs, or abusive parents, or boyfriends who push for sex, or living in Ireland. I hate books like that. For one thing they're all so relentlessly downbeat, and despite that you just know everyone will overcome all their problems in the end and start to Grow Up and Understand How the World Works. You can practically see the capitals.

I will laugh about this one day, I told myself. I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can't imagine them properly now.

I don't know what I think about Jesus, but I know what I think about Aslan.

Things need to be worth doing for themselves, not just for practice for some future time.

"There is this dream, in America. ...that if you worked, and if you cared, and if you believed in yourself, you could do anything."

"(sometimes people don't see other people the way they see themselves)"

"... when the British public voted to name a research vessel Boaty McBoatface, the government said no. But when we voted to commit cultural and economic seppuku, the powers-that-be didn't seem to have a fucking clue..."

...there's a listening issue with the human race, who have never understood when such things [visits from the Harbinger of Death] are fair warning and when they're merely courtesy before the storm.

It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.

"You must choose the life you live at the time you live it"

At the end, he sat in the hotel room and counted out the pills.

What a waste it was, what a terrible waste, to take a person who dreamed cities and gardens and enormous shining skies and teach him that the only answer to an unanswerable suffering was slaughter.

"The very best space fascist girl scout of them all."

...after taking in her navy and gold splendor none of them risked arguing, just sloped off with the affronted air of wronged teenagers everywhere.

"Justice," Avi said. "It's pretty simple, really. You killed my world. I'm killing yours. All of them. Or almost."

Kyr had waited her whole life to come face-to-face with something she could blame.