One day you will kiss a man you can't breathe without, and find that breath is of little consequence.

Dying is overrated. Human sentimentality has twisted it into the ultimate act of love. Biggest load of bullshit in the world. Dying for someone isn't the hard thing. The man that dies escapes. Plain and simple. Game over. End of pain...Try living for someone. Through it all-good, bad, thick, thin, joy, suffering. That's the hard thing.

Desire makes life happen. Makes it matter. Makes everything worth it. Desire is life. Hunger to see the next sunrise or sunset, to touch the one you love, to try again. 'Hell would be waking up and wanting nothing,' he agrees.

I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style,park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part-Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like.

It's just that in the Deep South, women learn at a young age that when the world is falling apart around you, it's time to take down the drapes and make a new dress.

You, Ms. Lane, are a menace to others! A walking, talking catastrophe in pink!

The more excited I get, the more I vibrate.""Now there's a thought," Lor says."If you mean what I think you mean, you want to shut the fuck up and never think it again," Ryodan says.

Was he a good kisser, Ms. Lane?” Barrons asked, watching me carefully.I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand at the memory. “It was like being owned.”Some women like that.”Not me.”Perhaps it depends on the man doing the owning.”I doubt it. I couldn’t breathe with him kissing me.”One day you may kiss a man you can’t breathe without, and find breath is of little consequence.”Right, and one day my prince might come.”I doubt he’ll be a prince, Ms. Lane. Men rarely are.

It's just another of Robin's sayings. Like, 'Holy strawberries, Batman, we're in a jam! Or, Holy Kleenex, Batman, it was right under our nose and we blew it!

And Mega has a crush on Chester.""I do not!""Do too, Mega.""He's like, old!""How old, Christian says.""Like at least thirty or something."Lor laughs. " Fucking ancient, ain't it, kid?""Dude," I agree. I like Lor.

Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.

It's often only in the lies we refuse to speak that any truth can be heard at all.

It's not enough to listen to their words. You have to mine their silences for buried ore. It's often only in the lies that we refuse to speak that truth can be heard at all.

The entire time I'm burning in Hell, I'll regret each tear I made you weep. But if Hell were the price for twenty days with you, I'd condemn myself again and again. - Cian MacKeltar

I have found there to be little distance between the unlatching of a chain and the spreading of a woman’s legs. As if they can never unbar only a single entrance. It’s a disease called hope. Women suffer from it greatly.

Is anyone who's supposed to be dead actually dead?

Sit," Chloe said, dashing after him and tugging firmly at his sleeve. "Let's hear the rest of it. You can kill him later."~Chloe to Dageus.

You can’t give somebody faith. They either got it or they don’t.

Things we had, like respect and trust, but also freely expressed desires and accountability to whatever degree it took to make both people happy. It took work, a willingness to fight passionately and fairly--out of bed, not just in it--commitment and honesty. It took waking up and saying each day, "I hold this man sacred and always will. He's my sun, moon, and stars." It took letting the other person in; a thing I'd stopped doing. It took being unafraid to ask for what you wanted, to put yourself on the line, to risk it all for love.

Strength wasn‘t about being able to do everything alone. Strength was knowing when to ask for help and not being too proud to do it.

What are you" -Mac "I don't follow" -Jericho "You dropped 30 feet in that warehouse. You should have broken something. What are you?" -Mac "A man with a rope." -Jericho

I smack myself in the forehead. “Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods, they’re not moving!” I exclaim. There’s a choking noise over my head somewhere. “Etruscan snoods?” I glow quietly inside. Some accomplishments mean more than others. I am officially the Shit. Now and forever. “Dude, watch your question marks. I just pried one out of you.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “Admit it, you lost your eternal fecking composure.” “You have an obsession with a delusion about how I end my sentences. What the fuck are Etruscan snoods?” “Dunno. It’s just another of Robin’s sayings. Like, ‘Holy strawberries, Batman, we’re in a jam!’ ” “Strawberries.” “Or, ‘Holy Kleenex, Batman, it was right under our nose and we blew it!’

His heavy-lidded gaze reflected a languor that had nothing to do with having just awakened, and there was no doubt what was on his mind. But this is no safe cherry picker, Gwen thought, growing more concerned by the moment.This man looks like a cherry tree chopper-downer.

With the Book hitching rides, hiding on people, guess we’re all going to be dressing like skanks for a while, huh? Skintight or skin. Dude, everybody’s everything’s gonna be hanging out, and some o’ those fat chicks at the abbey are gonna gross my eyeballs right outta my head. Muffin tops and camel toes, gah!

I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself.

I love books, they're in my blood.

Fear and doubt are major stampeders.

Friends don’t build cages for each other.

I don’t know where dreams come from. Sometimes I wonder if they’re genetic memories, or messages from something divine. Warnings perhaps. Maybe we do come with an instruction booklet but we’re too dense to read it, because we’ve dismissed it as the irrational waste product of the ‘rational’ mind. Sometimes I think all the answers we need are buried in our slumbering subconscious, int he dreaming. The booklet right there, and ever night when we lay our heads down on the pillow it flips open. The wise read it, heed it. The rest of us try as hard as we can upon awakening to forget any disturbing revelations we might have found there.

There are only two things to worry about in life: either you’re free or you’re not. If you’re free, there’s nothing to worry about. If you’re not, you kick the shit out of everything around you until you are.

I said breathe. Not do a fish-out of-water imitation.

Sighing dismally, she acknowledged that some things just weren't humanly possible - not even Martha Stewart could fold fitted sheets.

I would wear pink because I knew my future was anything but rosy. I would accessorize myself to the hilt, and I would wear flirty shoes because my world needed more beauty to counter all the ugliness in it. I would wear pink because I hated gray, I didn’t deserve white, and I was sick of black.

It's funny how, when things seem the darkest, moments of beauty present themselves in the most unexpected places.

Sheep are always looking for a new shepherd when the terrain gets rocky.

I can see you are a fine lady, but this boy is randy as a goat around you and it's plain to see. If he seeks the joys of wedded bliss, he can wed you. Without a weddin' he'll be havin' no bliss.

My city. I pondered that phrase, wondered why Barrons felt that way. He never said “our world.” He always said “your world.” But he called Dublin his city. Merely because he’d been in it so long? Or had Barrons, like me, been beguiled by her tawdry grace, fallen for her charm and colorful dualities?I looked around “my” bookstore. That was what I called it. Did we call the things of our heart our own, whether they were or not?

How dare the embodiment of her worst nightmare come packaged as her hottest fantasy?

I must be dreaming. Bring that sweet ass over here and I'll show you what God made women and well-hung Scotsmen for.

If I entered a tropical beach, would I end up in Nazi Germany with my highly inconvenient black hair?

His coworker was velvety-skinned, a sexy boy-on-the-cusp-of man.

I can't find a man I want, and I'm beginning to think the problem is me. Maybe I expect too much. Maybe I'm holding out for something that doesn't even exist." She'd voiced her secret fear. Maybe grand passion was just a dream. With all the kissing she'd done in the past few months, she'd not once been overcome with desire. Her parents certainly hadn't had any great passion between them. Come to think of it, she wasn't sure she'd ever seen grand passion outside of a movie theater or a book.

Attitude shapes reality.

I return my attention to the situation at hand and realize Reality—the impatient bitch—has made my decision for me. She does that a lot. You get busy planning your life, then it has the nerve to just go ahead and happen to you before you’re ready. Before you even get the chance to aim yourself right!

I like sex for breakfast, kid. I eat early and often.

Sex either blows your fucking mind, or it’s not good enough.

Driving a hot car is a lot like sex to me, or a lot like I keep thinking sex should be: A total body experience, overwhelming, to all the senses, taking you places you've never been, packing a punch that leaves you breathless and touches your soul. The Viper was way more satisfying then my last boyfriend.

The man kisses me and I just hop right on him like he's the hottest new ride at Disneyland.

As he fills me, I wonder if—in the same way that sex makes its own unique perfume—we don’t really “make” love. As in create, manufacture, evoke an independent element in the air around us, and if enough of us did it really well, for real, not just for the hell of it, we could change the world. Because when he’s in me, I feel the space around us changing, charging, and it seems to set off some kind of feedback loop, where the more he touches me, the more I need him to. Having sex with Barrons sates my need. Then feeds it. Sates, then feeds. It’s a never-ending cycle. I get out of bed with him, frantic to be back in it again. And I—“—hated you for it,” he says gently.That was my line.“I never get enough, Mac. Drives me bug-fuck. I should kill you for what you make me feel.”I understand perfectly. He is my vulnerability. I would become Shiva, the world-eater, for him.

He calls me his Queen of the Night. He shows me the wonders in this incredible city. He encourages me to find my own way, and to choose what I think is right or wrong.And the sex, God, the sex! I never knew what sex was until him! It’s not soft music and candlelight, a choice, a deliberate action.It’s as involuntary as breathing, and as impossible not to do. It’s slammed up against a wall in a dark alley, or flat on my back on cold concrete because I can’t stand one more second without him. It’s on my hands and knees, dry-mouthed, heart-in-my-throat, waiting for the moment he touches me, and I’m alive again. It’s punishing and purifying, velvet and violent, and it makes everything else melt away, until nothing matters but getting him inside me and I wouldn’t just die for him—I’d kill for him, too.Like I did tonight.

Failure is always new information, and those who are willing to suffer it repeatedly make it a stepping-stone to success.

It's what you choose to believe that makes you the person you are.

She waited, thinking you were different from those who used and betrayed her. She believed you would find her, come charging to her rescue. That belief was as misplaced as the monsters we faced were deadly. The day came she finally lost her faith in you, and I was there as I’ve always been there when she needed me.

Tuatha De do not walk the human realm alone. Actually, they don't walk alone much anywhere. Only the occasional rogue Fae will do so.""Like yourself?""Yes Most of my kind have no fondness for solitude. Those who walk alone are not to be trusted.""Really," she said dryly. "Except for me," he amended, with a faint, insouciant grin.

Missing Alina was worse than a terminal illness. At least when you were terminal you knew the pain was going to end eventually. But there was no light at the end of my tunnel. Grief was going to devour me, day into night, night into day, and although I might feel like I was dying from it, might even wish I was, I never would. I was going to have to walk around with a hole in my heart forever. I was going to hurt for my sister until the day I died. If you don't know what I mean or you think I'm being melodramatic, then you've never really loved anyone.

Grief shared was grief lessened.

I see how he feels about his world and I want to be one of the parts he prizes. I want to be worth fighting for. Worth the same kind of effort he puts into the things that matter to him. Like Dani.”"I don’t tell her no human matters to the boss like Dani.

You loved me.”It wasn’t a question, but he answered it readily. “I do. More than life. My heart. I didn’t just pick a sweet turn of phrase to name you, but spoke from my soul when I named you thus. Without my heart I couldn’t live. And I couldn’t breathe without you.”“Are you a man who has more than one heart?”“Nay. Only this one. But it’s bitter and dark now from the pain I’ve brought you.

...When a man first awakens, it sometimes takes several moments before he starts thinking clearly.""And here I thought it took several years, perhaps a lifetime for the average man's intellect to kick in.

I looked from one to the other, and realized that Barrons and my dad were having one of those wordless conversations he and I have from time to time. Though the language was, by nature, foreign to me, I grew up in the Deep South where a man’s ego is roughly the size of his pickup truck, and women get an early and interesting education in the not-so-subtle roar of testosterone.

Men. Do they all evade as first line of defense?

Life took the strongest root with a little bit of rain and a whole lot of shit for fertilizer.

When he kisses me again, the last part of me that could stand myself dies.

Barrons: "He got upset it wouldn't shut up and tore its head off."Mac: "The child?" I gasped

Life is too hard, too much to handle. Nobody told me there’d be days like these. How could nobody tell me there’d be days like these? How could they let me grow up like that—happy and pink and stupid?

It's hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash. I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows she the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it.

One day you do meet a man who kisses you and you can't breathe around it and you realize you don't need air.

The wound you refuse to dress is one that will never heal. You gush lifeblood and never even know why. It will make you weak at a critical moment when you need to be strong.

Most people are good and occasionally do something they know is bad. Some people are bad and struggle every day to keep it under control. Others are corrupt to the core and don’t give a damn, as long as they don’t get caught. But evil is a completely different creature, Mac. Evil is bad that believes it’s good.

It's our actions that define us. What we choose. What we resist. What we're willing to die for.

Don’t lose yourself in anger, Mac. It’s gasoline. You can burn it as fuel, or you can use it to torch everything you care about and end up standing on a scorched battlefield, with everybody dead, even you - only your body doesn’t have the good grace to quit breathing.

You both talk too much,” the kid says. “Shut up. Don’t make me tell you again.”We shut up, which I find hysterically funny.

I have studied humans for a small eternity. Intent infuses their every movement. Road maps to their inner navigation, plastered all over their skin. Born to be slaves.

I lay my head on his chest and listen to his heart beating, solid and sure.....he reads me so well. He's known about my emotional empathy since we were children. Nothing disturbs him...Few can lie to me... I don't know the truth, only that there is a lie. It takes a scrupulously honest man to love me. That's my Sean. We learned to trust each other completely before we were old enough to have learned suspicion.

In my experience, anybody besides your mom that feeds you is going to want something in exchange for it.

I'm the one who will always watch over you. Always be there to fuck you back to your senses when you need it, the one who will never let you die. I pull my shirt over my head and kick off my shoes. "What more could a woman ask?

A lamb in a city of wolves.

She loves. And she doesn't know how to pull it back when you have to, because sometimes you sure as feck have to. Got to grab it up with both hands and pull it back before somebody turns into knives and uses it to cut you to pieces.

We stand strong, or we cower. We emerge victorious, tempered by our trials , or fractured by a permanent, damming fault line.

He had a come-and-get-me-baby-I'm-pure-trouble-and-you're-gonna-love-it kind of attitude.

When anything is possible, how do you choose?

Love hath no pride.

Anyone worth knowing breaks once. Once. No shame, no foul if you survive it. You did.

She shrugged, looking as baffled by it as he felt. "I don't know. I wonder sometimes if people even know what love is anymore. Some days, when I'm watching my friends change lovers as unperturbedly as they change shoes, I think the world just got filled with too many people, and all our technological advances made things so easy that it cheapened our most basic, essential value somehow," she told him. "It's like spouses are commodities nowadays: disposable, constantly getting tossed back out for trade on the market and everyone's trying to trade up, up--like there is a 'trading up' in love." She rolled her eyes. "No way. That's not for me. I'm having one husband. I'm getting married once. When you know going in that you're staying for life, it makes you think harder about it, go slower, choose really well.

One day you may kiss a man you can’t breathe without, and find breath is of little consequence.”“Right, and one day my prince might come.”“I doubt he’ll be a prince, Ms. Lane. Men rarely are.

Now it's not just my lip you'll be needing to kiss if you're wishing to make amends with me, Irish.

And there, my dear Fio, you make one of Womankind's greatest mistakes: falling in love with a man's potential. We so rarely share the same view of it, and even more rarely care to achieve it.

When you were too young and naïve to see the risks, I incurred your wrath to protect you. Scream at me for it if you must. Thank me for it when you finally grow up.

Fine. Okay. I killed her. But I didn’t mean to. And I didn’t kill her, kill her.”“Oh, I see. As long as you didn’t kill her, kill her, then that’s okay.

I think sex with him might undo my essential cellular cohesion.

Lust is a thing of the blood. Doesn't need head or heart.

But he didn't need to seek visual confirmation of what he'd just heard to know she had. And the truth was, he couldn't blame her. He'd not have let her die, either. He'd have moved mountains. He'd have battled God or Devil for his wife's life. She'd betrayed him. He smiled faintly.

I am going to love you now, slow and sweet, but when you come, I'm going to f*** you the way I need to. The way I've been dreaming about since the moment I saw you.

He was sexual in a way that made women think of deeply repressed fantasies therapists and feminists alike would cringe to hear tell of.

She was tipping her head back to inquire, when two men entered the great hall and the question flew right out of her head. They were simply two of the most gorgeous men she'd ever seen. Twins, though different. They were both tall and powerfully built. One was taller by a few inches, with dark hair that swept just past his shoulders and eyes like shard of silver and ice while the other had long black hair falling in a single braid to his waist, and eyes as gold as Adam's torque. They were elegantly dressed in tailored clothing of dark hues, with magnificent bodies that dripped with raw sex ap

Velvet looks horrified. “If you are fool enough to address King R’jan, you will do it thus and in no other manner! ‘My King, Liege, Lord, and Master, your servant begs you grant it leave to speak.’”“Wow. Totally delusionary there.”“Good luck with that,” Ryodan says. “She doesn't beg to speak, or do anything else. You can lock her up, down, and sideways and it’s never going to happen.”I beam at him. I had no idea he thought so highly of me.

Why did you laugh right before you lost consciousness.”“Death’s an adventure. I lived big. Rigor mortis makes your face stick. So, who knew how to thaw me?”“Death’s an insult.”“At least an affront,” I agree.

I’ve never paid any attention to time. Dancer says I’ve enjoyed a luxury most people never have. He hates clocks and watches and everything that has to do with time. He says people already have too many lost days and that most folks live in the past or the future but never the present, always saying stuff like “I’m unhappy because ‘X’ happened to me yesterday, or I’ll be happy again when ‘Y’ happens to me tomorrow.” He says time is the ultimate villain.

Then why was his tongue in your mouth? Was he conducting a clinical test of your gag reflex?" He smiled, but not nicely. "How is your gag reflex, Ms. Lane? Are you a hair trigger?"Barrons likes to use sexual innuendo to try to shut me up. I think he expects the well-raised southern belle in me will think eew and back off. Sometimes, I do think eew, but I don't back off. "I'm a spitter, if that's what you're asking." I flashed him a too-sweet smile."Didn't look that way to me. I think you're a swallower. His tongue was halfway to China and you were still taking it.""Jealous?

Your race devotes itself to justifying its errors, not correcting them

And there you have it...if I knew that I could only have a few nights in that man's arms or nothing, I would take those magic nights and use them to keep me warm for the rest of my life.

I kept it to remind me that although there is evil, there is sometimes beauty and light. You, Jillian. You were always my light.

He is my vulnerability

One of the first lessons a warrior is taught is that denial of one's circumstances only results in failure to recognize real danger.

I wept for me, for my sister, for things I couldn't even begin to put into words, and might never be able to explain. But it felt something like this: I used to walk on my feet. Now all I knew how to do was crawl. And I wasn't sure how long it was going to take for me to get up off my knees and regain my balance, but I suspected that when I did, I would never walk the same way again.

I'd never understood why anyone would want to live forever. It had always seemed to me that death lent life a certain poignancy, a necessary tension.

The single greatest advantage anyone can take into any battle is hope.

Women fight differently from men. You couldn’t get me to hurt a woman’s breasts for anything. I know how tender my own are when I’m PMSing. Besides, we feed babies with them.