Those who really love you don’t mean to hurt you and if they do, you can’t see it in their eyes but it hurts them too.
Changing is what people do when they have no options left.
I need you to be happy. I need one of us to be happy.
I need to stop fantasizing about running away to some other life and start figuring out the one I have.
Yeah, the whole family knows. It’s no big deal. One night at dinner I said, ‘Mom, you know the forbidden love that Spock has for Kirk? Well, me too.’ It was easier for her to understand that way.
No,” said Luis, “You can’t date the Lord of the Night Court.””Well, I’m not, he dumped me.””You can’t get dumped by the lord of the night court.””Oh, yes, you can. You so completely can.
The truth is messy. It’s raw and uncomfortable. You can’t blame people for preferring lies.
This, the language of deception, we both understand. We were born to it, along with the curses.
Telling Sam and Daneca feels like peeling off my own skin to expose everything underneath. It hurts.
If curiosity killed the cat, it was satisfaction that brought it back.
She took a deep breath, “Last chance. Are you in need of rescuing?” His expression turned very strange, almost as if she’d struck him, “Yes,” he said finally.
Death has his favorites, like anyone. Those who are beloved of Death will not die.
I will guard you from Death, for I have no fear of him.
People are fragile. They die of mistakes, of overdoses, of sickness. But mostly they die of Death.
One fine day, in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other. They pulled out their swords and shot one another. One deaf cop, on the beat heard the noise, and came and shot the two dead boys.
Ah coffee. The sweet balm by which we shall accomplish today’s tasks.
Oh- and grab the plastic bag over by my suitcase.”I slug down the last of the coffee and get up. The bag contains panty hose. I put them on her desk.”They’re for you.””You want me to look homeless, desperate, but also kind of fabulous?
We all wind up drawn to what we’re afraid of, drawn to try to find a way to make ourselves safe from a thing by crawling inside of it, by loving it, by becoming it.
Crippled things are always more beautiful. It’s the flaw that brings out beauty.
She’d always been a little contemptuous of beauty, as though it was something you had to trade away some other vital thing for.
Nothing can happen more beautiful than death – Walt Whitman
Anyone who offers their heart on a silver platter deserves what they get.
I have no memory of climbing the stairs up to the roof. I don’t even know how to get where I am, which is a problem since I’m going to have to get down, ideally in a way that doesn’t involve dying.
I thought of how proud he was when he took the marks- cutting the skin of his throat in a long slash and then packing it with ashes until keloid scars rose up.He called it his second smile.
You and your sister are very dear to each other. To show your regard, you give each other lovely bouquets of lies.
But I didnt do anything wrong..” Which is stupid of course, things dont happen to people because they deserve them.
There’s nothing quite as funny as someone else’s misery – Cassel Sharpe
Little mouse,” a voice said through the keyhole. “Don’t you know the more you wriggle, the greater the cat’s delight?
Maybe it was that nearly everyone else was dead and she felt a little bit dead too, but she figured that even a vampire deserved to be saved. Maybe she ought to leave him, but she wasn’t going to.
Keep going’ she told herself, ‘Don’t look back.’ But she looked anyways.
Be careful,” Aidan called from the bed. “You don’t know what he might do.” “We all know what you’d do, though, don’t we?
I don’t want to be a vampire’ she told herself. But in her dreams, she kind of did.
You said you were allowed to lose it,’ some part of her reminded herself. ‘Not yet, not yet.
Behind Tana there was the sounds of splintering wood, as though something very large had hot the door. “No,” she said softly, “Oh no. No.” “Leave me,” said Gavriel. …..”Shut up or I might,” she told him.
In the dream, Tana’s mother loved her more than anyone or anything. More than death.
please,Tana,please.’ -lots of characters in The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
His voice had a faint trace of an accent she couldn’t place – one that made her pretty sure he was no local kid infected the night before.
In those stories, one is often asked to do something unimaginably terrible to the creature. Cut off it’s head, say. A test. Not a test of love. A test of trust. Trust lifts the spell.
I got bored,” he says. “Besides, you know what’s creepier than walking around your dead brothers’ apartment? Sitting alone in a hearse in front of his apartment.
I’m going to take off your gag. And if you try to bite me or grab me or anything, I’ll hit you with this thing as hard as I can as many times as I can. Understood?
That was seven years ago. The doctors told her father the memory would fade, like the big messy scar on her arm, but neither ever did.
He let out a hiss of pain,then smiled that crooked, sheepish smile he always fell back on when he was caught doing something bad. “Sorry. I-I didn’t mean to. I just- I’ve been lying here for hours, thinking about blood.
Better to leave him with the memory of their being a pair of monsters, wrapped in each other’s arms.
Magic gives you a lot of choices,” Grandad says. “Most of them are bad.
She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone — desire so acute that it became despair.
Baby,” she says in a harsh whisper, “in this world, lots of people will try to grind you down. They need you to be small so they can be big. You let them think whatever they want, but you make sure you get yours. You get yours.
The moment she was cursed, I lost her. Once it wears off- soon- she will be embarrassed to remember things that she said, things she did, things like this. No matter how solid she feels in my arms, she is made of smoke.
I know how to be the witness to her grief. I don’t know how to be this kind of villain.
Her tragedy, if she had one, was to be as normal and average as any child ever born.
Some things exist whether you believe in them or not
Lie until even you believe it – that’s the real secret of lying
There’s a tipping point with lies, a point where you’ve said something so many times that it feels truer than the truth.
I can learn to live with guilt. I don’t care about being good.
Once someone’s hurt you, it’s harder to relax around them, harder to think of them as safe to love. But it doesn’t stop you from wanting them. Sometimes I actually think it makes the wanting worse.
If you keep it,” Daneca says, “he’ll have his claws in you.”Everyone has their claws in me. Everyone.
You’re yourself,” Tana said, grinning. “More purely yourself than anyone I know. And if you can’t see who that is anymore, then see yourself the way I see you.
Who cares about a test? There will be a million more quizzed in your life.
When we turn,is there something shoved inside of us or is it more that something inside of us has been released?
When Tana was six, vampires were Muppets, endlessly counting, or cartoon villains in black cloaks with red polyester lining.
So you’ll teach me?” Val asked.Ravus nodded agin. “I will make you as terrible as you desire.””I don’t want to be – ,” she started, but he held up his hand.”I know you’re very brave,” he said.”Or st
No trouble ever got fixed late at night,” he said. “Midnight is for regrets.
She swallowed his blood, a dark vintage from some forgotten cellar. She felt like Persephone in Hades, pomegranate seeds bursting against her teeth, juice rolling on her tongue, and the more she had, the more she hungered.
You can always count on your family to love you. And to betray you. And then to feel guilty about it.
I thought you were her knight, but you have become only her woodsman–taking little girls into the forest to cut out their hearts.
Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first.
She loves the serene brutality of the ocean, loves the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air.
… on the lawn one late summer day, her pale hair tangled because she’d cry if anyone tried to brush it, spinning around and around until she got so dizzy she fell in a pile of bare feet and dandelions and sundress.
I’m afraid my voice is going to break. I am afraid she is going to hear how much this hurts.
You can break a thing, but you cannot always guide it afterward into the shape you want.
This is the part in the movie where that guy says, “Zombies? What zombies?” just before they eat his brains. I don’t want to be that guy.
Dead or not, I have come for his heart and I will have it.
She looks honestly upset, but then, I’ve learned that I can’t read her. The problem with a really excellent liar is that you have to just assume they’re always lying.
Even from the beginning, that was the problem. People liked pretty things. People even liked pretty things that wanted to kill and eat them.
Remember that I’m still a monster. I can listen to you scream and cry and beg and I still won’t let you out.
She was torn between the impulse to run and the urge to curl up like a pill bug, close her eyes, tuck her head beneath her arms, and play the game of since-I-can’t-see-monsters-monsters-can’t-see-me.
Three of them, dressed in silvery gray, on three horses—one black, one white, and the third red.
Inspiration comes from everywhere. From life, observing people, etc. From movies and books you love. From research.