"The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over. People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn't had time to do."
"Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall."
"Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey."
"I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names."
"The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been."
"My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her."