“It was one thing to accept I couldn't have Dimitri. It was something entirely different to realize someone else could.”

“Why pretend to be something you're not? If you have to be someone, be someone no one else is.”

“I could make him mine. But I don't want him. I want someone else. It feels strange to have spent so much time wishing for something, for someone, and then one day, suddenly, to just stop.”

“If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.”

“I was weak and pathetic and I couldn't control myself. An explanation, especially a bullshit one, doesn't alter the circumstances. I need to change, I have to change, and at this point, change is my only option, unless I am ready to die. All that matters is that I make myself something else and someone else for the future.”

“I came to realize that if people could make me angry they could could control me. Why should I give someone else such power over my life?”

“She was right about something else too," Dimitri said after a long pause…. "That I do still love you.”

“He bit his lip and realized how right the Protector had been to stop him from offering her a commission months ago. Not because she couldn't do the job, but because she was afraid she couldn't. Because she would have refused it, and that refusal would have ended her career forever. Inability, real or imagined, could never truly be overcome once an officer accepted deep inside that he could no longer hack it. That damage was almost always permanent, for it was self-inflicted and no one else could heal it for him.”

““Knowing something as knowledge” and “realizing” are different. You have to realize.”

“Most of the things I write are things that are personal to me. I realized that that's the only way to really be honest. If you go writing about someone else you're just guessing at it.”