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Desmond wasn't good, no matter how much he wanted to be, and better than his family just wasn't enough. Every day he helped keep us here, he hurt me.

Does that mean that you love me too?

My mother taught me to make sure the man always says it first.

Doing a good thing for another Butterfly was the same as doing it for him.

She looked like she could burst into music @ any point. Unless you looked @ her face, @ tears that tracked silently down her cheeks, @ absolutely vacant look in her eyes, and understood that whatever made her Tereza wasn't there anymore.

I'd been in Garden long enough that outside world had become somewhat surreal, like a half-believed legend.

There was a book for each of the girls from the apartment. It was subtler than Nazira's drawings or Bliss's figures, but the same impulse.

Evita had once painted me a lovelly chrysanthemum on a rock, but that showed her sunny personality, not mine. My keeping it just meant that she was important to me.

The gifts we give say as much about us as the gifts we get and keep.

If this is the twisted she's admitting to, how much worse is the twisted she's still hiding?

Gardener clung to his delusions. Desmond eventually confronted hard truths, or @ least beginnings of them. He didn't know what to do w/them, but he didn't try to make them less than they were.

I was skilled @ reading Gardener & Avery. Desmond was more difficult. Unlike his father & brother, he didn't know what he wanted. I was good @ escaping people, not manipulating them. This was new ground.

It had been a long time since I could sit w/a male & not feel actively threatened. Not safe, precisely, but not threatened.

Politicians are like child services ... Ultimately useful, but pain in @$$ all the way there.

If I'd never been much for hope, neither had I been much for despair, but I could feel it choking me w/every memory.

Sometimes he liked a final f#ck before killing a girl.

You can die from water more ways than drowning in it. Drinking too much is a lethal as not having any.

At heart of Garden, though, was loneliness & ever-present threat of shattering, & connecting w/others seemed safer of two evils. Not lesser, necessarily, but safer.

Some of them are friends. All of them are family. I guess that's just what happens.

All I'm doing is forcing you to breathe in high concentration of carbon dioxide ... attaches to your bloodstream in place of oxygen & slows body's responses. When body gets to critical point, when you're on verge of passing out, body's natural responses push past psychological factors

"Someone is just dead!" said the little girl, for her old grandmother, the only person who had loved her, and who was now no more, had told her, that when a star falls, a soul ascends to God.

"The Little Match Girl" by Hans Christian Andersen ... It's the kind of story that makes more sense in the Garden than in the real world.

she wasn't in the tattoo room or her bed. She never appeared in the display cases. There was no goodbye. There was just ... nothing. There was literally nothing left of her, not even a name.

He was never going to go to police. We both knew it. All that past half hour had changed was that now he hated himself a little for it.

Replacing blood w/formaldehyde retards decay, enough for resin to preserve everything else. Even when you're gone, Maya, you will not be forgotten.

... he'd place me in glass case & pump it full of clear resin to give me second life no mere electrical fire could end.

Her death was heartbreaking, and I couldn't bear to think that brief existence was all she would ever have. I didn't want to forget her. As long as I could remember her, a part of her would still live. I built the cases, researched ways to preserve her against decay.

Rather than bringing his Eve to a garden, he'd built one around her, and served as the angel with the flaming sword to keep her in.

I methodically peeled the orange. I always tried to get it off in one piece, a perfect spiral. So far I never had. It always broke partway through.

Our choices make us who we are. What choices are you making, Desmond?

I don't think I'm making any choices right now.

Then you're automatically making the wrong ones.

You must think I'm despicable excuse for a human being.

I think you have the potential to be. I also think you have the potential to be better.

"I just can't make sense of this place."

"Given that it doesn't make sense, that's understandable."