No life had ever been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end. - Hugh Howey

Love was earned and hard-fought and cherished. It was Marco's face and his rough palm on her cheek. It wasn't something a family got for being a family.

He turns to me. There’s a look on his face that makes him appear a decade younger. A look of wonder and discovery. I remember falling in love with that look.

The thing I hated while reading this book, it turns out, was me. Bad things happen, and shoulders are shrugged. The most serious of events are blended with the strange. The author pulled me inside his mind, and what I found there was a dead stillness, the somber and poignant wisdom of someone with little hope and scars across his eyes.