I sit with my knees pulled in tight and my arms wrapped around my shins. I can no longer feel my feet, as if blood refuses to spread so far from my heart.

— Carrie Ryan

It's as if there is infinity between our lips, and we will never actually touch. Like math, where dividing by half can last for eternity.

— Carrie Ryan

It's funny, most people think that revenge is a passionate affair, driven by rage and pain. But it can't be. Feelings such as those make you weak. They overwrite thought and cause reckless impulses that lead to poor decisions.

— Carrie Ryan

It's not about surviving. It should be about love. When you know love...that's what makes this life worth it. When you live with it every day. Wake up with it, hold on to it during the thunder and after a nightmare. When love is your refuge from the death that surrounds us all and when it fills you so tight that you can't express it.

— Carrie Ryan

It wouldn't have mattered if they were scratches or not," he says, his voice like liquid. "I was bitten during the escape from the house." My limbs go weak, everything inside me folding in collapsing on itself." I was already dead," he says, opening his eyes.

— Carrie Ryan

I will always need you," I whisper. "All of this time I've waited for you. And you were never coming for me. Why did you let me wait for you?

— Carrie Ryan

Knowing that this is what it means to live. That this love, this need is what drives us to push and fight and build and grow. That as long as there's hope and love in this world, there will always be the living.

— Carrie Ryan

Life is life. You choose to live it or you do not.

— Carrie Ryan

Maybe if she'd invited him into the forest all those years ago, things would have ended differently. But she doubted it. Darkness grew where it would and took what it wanted. It staked its claim and never let go. And no one could pry you free of it.

— Carrie Ryan

Not all monsters are filled with darkness.

— Carrie Ryan