Zitate und Sprüche von Ellen Wittlinger

For Kate and Morgan
and for everyone
whose first love
was a hard love.

The world is dark, and light is precious.
Come closer, dear reader.
You must trust me.
I am telling you a story.

Reading is a hobby, but for some of us, it's an escape from the difficulties we face. To all of you who escape into books, I want to thank you for escaping into this one.

To Michelle - my love and life's partner and Malia and Sasha - whose dazzling light makes everything brighter.

To my husband, David Yoon, who showed me my heart.
And to my smart, beautiful daughter Penny, who made it bigger.

To the First Mother who Brings up a Happy Child.

To Mom,
Who took me to the library.

To caffeine and sugar, my companions through many a long night of writing.

It is very unnerving to be proven wrong, particularly when you are really right and the person who is really wrong is the one who is proving you wrong and proving himself, wrongly, right. Right?

What can I say about a man who knows how I think and still sleeps next to me with the lights off?

The dedication of this book is split seven ways: To Neil, to Jessica, to David, to Kenzie, to Di, to Anne, and to you, if you have stuck with Harry until the very end.

This is presented as a work of fiction and dedicated to nobody.

To all the English teachers, especially the great ones.

My first stepfather used to say that what I didn’t know would fill a book. Well, here it is.

Walk until the darkness is a memory, and you become the sun on the next traveler's horizon.

Humans had always been better at killing than any other living thing.

"And what if there's nothing in there?"
"You die and there's nothing beyond that. Nothing. Nothing remains. Someone might remember you for a little while after but not for long."

There's only one thing that can save a man from madness and that's uncertainty.

The number of places in paradise is limited; only in hell is entry open to all.

Do you know the parable about the frog in the cream? Two frogs landed in a pail of cream. One, thinking rationally, understood straight away that there was no point in resistance and that you can't deceive destiny. But then what if there's an afterlife – why bother jumping around, entertaining false hopes in vain? He crossed his legs and sank to the bottom. The second, the fool, was probably an atheist. And she started to flop around. It would seem that she had no reason to flail about if everything was predestined. But she flopped around and flopped around anyway . . . Meanwhile, the cream turned to butter. And she crawled out. We honour the memory of this second frog's friend, eternally damned for the sake of progress and rational thought.

There are some things that you don't want to do and you pledge to yourself that you won't do, you forbid yourself, and then suddenly they happen all by themselves. You don't even have time to think about them, and they don't make it to the cognitive centres of the brain: they just happen and that's it, and you're left just watching yourself with surprise, and convincing yourself that it wasn't your fault, it just happened all by itself.