"Man, they were death-ray eyes"

"When it goes off your heart thuds to a stop for a millisecond, wham."

"She's...bouncing around the kitchen and talking a mile a minute."

"Boy does that make his eyes blaze...so upset he can hardly talk."

"Gram is uneasy, I can see her eyes flitting nervously around the room, like she's crossing the border into a really foreign country."

"What she means is, you're a spitting image of your old man."

"One day this wimpy little kid tried it when nobody was looking and the sword slipped out like it was stuck in butter."

"I must have seen her bringing Freak to daycare, way back in the dark ages."

"It makes him sort of out of breath, you can hear him wheezing, or I guess you'd call it panting, like a dog does on a hot day."

"Books are like truth serum--if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real."

"Everything seems really great, just like Gwen says, except when I lie down on my bed it hits me, boom, and I'm crying like a baby."

"Now the fair Gwen is calling up my Gram, probably to report a great hulking beast that lives in the cellar."

"The little freak is staring at me bug-eyed and he goes, 'Oh, it talks.'"

"There's this one scraggly tree behind the little freak's house, right? Like a stick in the ground with a few wiped-out branches."

"I chase after the thing until it boinks against the scrawny tree trunk."

"Gram reaches out and she puts her hand on my shoulder, real light and feathery."

"It's cool and dim in there and you float like a cloud--no, you are a cloud."