Hiding from the truth was worse than being lied to.
Her parents didn't understand that braille meant big clunky books that marked you as different, while audiobooks live invisibly on your phone and text-to-speech gave you the whole damn internet.
He shook with another sob, sinking to one knee and realizing that the survival of that one ship – one girl, really – had been for a moment more important than the war itself, or a city’s millions. The...
Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least to grow your own brain.
Even mocking people helped their face stats. In the reputation economy, the only real way to hurt anyone was to ignore them completely. And it was pretty hard to ignore someone who made your blood boi...
Dr. Barlow, it is, of course, customary to check with the caption before, uh, giving away his ship. -Deryn Sharp
Don’t worry, he kept saying. The overworld can’t hurt you if you stay calm. I wasn’t calm at all. But my panic was like a poisonous snake at a zoo, staring at me from the other side of thick glass. On...
Don't. Shoot. The air is full of hydrogen!
Doing what you're supposed to do is always boring.
Didn't this beat everything? A pretty and an ugly taking a stroll together. The warden came closer, confusion all over his middle-pretty face. Tally smiled. At least she was causing trouble to the end...
Didn't any of these brainless wonders ever notice that TV shows were called programs? the same word that meant a bunch of numbers stuck into a computer to make it dance for its masters?
Dess shook her head. Before he walked off, Rex said for you to wait. He said it's totally important you don't touch Angie until he comes back. and he said that if you were a pain about it, I get to hi...
Deryn felt brilliant, rising through the air at the center off everyone's attention, like an acrobat aloft on a swing. She wanted to make a speech:Hey, all you sods, I can fly and you can't! A natural...
Darcy didn’t want this interruption to last only a year. She wanted to see how long she could stretch this feeling out. To be dizzy with words again, like in that glorious week at the end of last Nove...
But you weren't born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.
Boys had something else...a sort of swagger about them.
Blurbs don’t work anymore! was another. You should make sure that the quotable lines of dialogue in your book never exceed a hundred and forty characters! seemed at best debatable.
Being fathomed was even better than being flattered, it turned out.
Because that's what people need after traumas, apparently - lots of long conversations about the effects of trauma.
Battered by the mind noise, huddled in the back with eyes closed and fists clenched, the old Melissa had understood pep rallies about as well as a bird sucked through a jet engine comprehended aircraf...