I try not to look obvious as I wait for Mom’s answer. I feel as if I am on the edge of a knife, my feet being sliced by the blade, teetering toward one side or the other.“Oh, of course!” Mom exclaims, her voice trilling with laughter. “How could I have forgotten?” And now I know. Really know. This woman is not my mother. I don’t know who she is, but I know absolutely who she is not.

— Beth Revis

It’s all in my mind. I’m in my right mind now, and my right mind is crazy." You need to wake up, Ella." The words are a command I cannot obey.

— Beth Revis

It was to apologize, and apologizing means he remembers what happened, and that means being trapped in a nightmare that’s already come true.

— Beth Revis

I’ve heard that when you’re in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you’re hyper-aware of what’s happening around you. As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me. Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren’t bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder’s cursing, my pounding heartbeat. I feel nothing—not the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb. Scent and taste disappear. The only thing about my body that works is my eyes, and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land—a continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home. My eyes drink up the image of the planet—and my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I’ve never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent—it dips and curves in ways I don’t recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect. And it’s not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home, but it will never be the home I left behind.

— Beth Revis

I’ve made her relive, over and over, the last few days,” I say softly, watching Ms. White’s body. “I’ve had to fill in the blanks with my own feelings and experiences. She’s spiraling around those last moments, those times when she went against me, and she’s feeling it from my side, the pain, the betrayal.” She thinks she’s awake. I’m doing to her just what she did to me. I’m making her feel what it was like to slowly go crazy, to question everything. To watch my mother die. To fight for my life against my best friend. To feel the man who loved me try to kill me. To know that the woman I trusted as much as my own mother betrayed me. That’s what I’m making her feel. I’ve turned her into me, and made her live the life she forced me to live. Over and over and over again.

— Beth Revis

I wish you were here,” I say, shutting my eyes and remembering the way Dad looked in my hallucination. I hear his voice again, so real that I’m worried I’m about to fall into another hallucination. Maybe that’s what I really want. If I can only see him in madness, is it worth trying to hold onto sanity?

— Beth Revis

I would use the same word to describe both my joy and the rain: torrential. This—this—this is all I ever wanted from the world: wide-open spaces and cooling rain and the chance to run.

— Beth Revis

I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn’t give up. Then I wrote one more book.

— Beth Revis

Kayleigh was right. Without the pills, you really do feel nothing. And nothing can be nice.

— Beth Revis

Maybe one day the smears of paint Harley left throughout Godspeed will fade, and maybe the stars never will, but I'd rather have Harley's colors.

— Beth Revis