Obsidian Butterfly

“Its like being friends with a tame leopard. It may curl on the foot of your bed and let you pet its head, but it can still eat your throat out. It just won't do it tonight.”

“If the eyes are the mirror to the soul, then Edward's in trouble because no one is home.”

“Edward wonders why I am so sympathetic to the monsters. The answer is simple. Because I am one.”

“Because we both understand that it isn't death that we fear. It's living.”

“She laughed that joyous full-blown sound that children eventually grow out of, as if the world bleeds the joy from them. Unless we're very lucky, the world teaches us to laugh more quietly, more coyly.”

“I was reminded that smiling is just another way of baring teeth, another way to snarl.”

“You can't hide from yourself, not forever, and you can't ever outrun yourself.”

“Its one of the joys of being a girl and not a guy. If I'm curious, I just ask.”

“I wondered for the first time if my face was empty more often than it was full, if I hid my emotions, my thoughts, even when I wasn't meaning to. How can you really tell what your own face shows.”

“My only excuse was that all the talk of rape had made me scared of him, and I didn't like that. So I was doing something that was actually very masculine. I was pulling the tail of the beast to make myself braver. Stupid.”

“There are some stories, some memories, that if you tell them after dark, they seem to gain weight, substance, as if there are things listening, waiting to hear themselves spoken of again. Words have power. But even thinking about them is sometimes enough to make the air in a room heavy.”

“Then why is the thought of giving her a gun while I hunt her one of my greatest fantasies?”

“He had a big hate on for me, a big one. I smiled sweetly and thought, fuck you, too. But I'd learned lately to lie even with my eyes. It was almost sad that I could lie with my eyes. They really are the mirror to your soul, and once they go, you are damaged. Not beyond repair, but damaged.”

“I knew in that instant that once she had loved him, really loved him, because only true love could twist to such hatred.”

“You know the old saying, half in jest, all in seriousness?”

“He said solve the case when what he usually meant was kill them, kill them all. As a plan, I'd heard worse. As a way of life, it lacked a certain romance. As a way to stay alive, it was just about perfect.”

“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

“There are all kinds of monsters. Most of them crave blood. Some for food, some for pleasure, but you're dead either way.”

“If you think love makes you happy, Hernando, you've either never been in love, or never been in love long enough to have to start compromising.”

“I hate women who complain about being fat when they're like a size five. Anything under size five isn't a woman. It's a boy with breasts.”

“If someone hurt them, his vengeance was going to be a thing of great and awesome terror.”

“Not normal calm, but the cool distant calm that you either learn to do during the really bad stuff, or you run screaming.”

Blue Moon

"Love sucks. Sometimes it feels good. Sometimes its just another way to bleed."

"But once you embrace the screaming darkness, eventually, you kill."

"There was a look in his eyes of such sorrow, of a shared knowledge of how many times you never really meant what you said, but the monsters were listening, and they always took you at your word."

"You're all mine, and no one hurts what's mine. Its not allowed."

"Some things are just true; you don't have to voice them, they just are. And somewhere along the way I'd started collecting people. My people. It used to mean friends, but lately, it meant more than that, or less."

"Death, jewelry or magic; it sounded like Valentine's Day."

"Been there, done that, wasn't impressed, didn't bother to get a t-shirt."

"Its your power that makes my heart beat, your pulse I can taste like cherries on my tongue."

"Somewhere in the first blow or the second, I'd broken something inside myself that would never heal. And I was content with it."

"My imagination was not going to be my friend for a while."

"You're this pretty little thing. You shouldn't be chopping peoples fingers off."

"The monster wasn't breathing down my neck; it was inside my head. Inside my head, fat and well-fed."

"I'll tell you the real horrible truth, Anita. No matter what you do or how bad you feel about it, life just goes on. Life doesn't give a fuck that your sorry or upset or deranged or tormented. Life just goes on."

"I can kill and not blink. Now I can torture and not regret it. I've become one of the monsters, and if it will save Richard's family, I am happy to be one."

Burnt Offerings

"I listened to my voice as I said it. I sounded tired, almost bored, and so serious it was almost frightening."

"Love is never free, Jean-Claude. Its the most expensive emotion we have."

"Love isn't the most expensive emotion, Asher. Hate is. Because hate will eat you up inside and destroy you, long before it kills you."

"Kill or leave him the hell alone, like any big predator. Don't fuck with it unless you can finish the job."

"It cut both ways, and I wanted to make my point deep and sharp."

"Not the dreams where we are hunted by the monsters, but the dreams where we are the monsters. We raise bloody hands to the sky and scream, not from fear, but from joy. The pure joy of slaughter. The cathartic moment when we plunge our hands into the hot blood of our enemies and there is no civilized thought to stop us from dancing on their graves."

"We're all creatures of light and darkness. Embracing your darkness won't kill the light. Goodness is stronger than that."

"I seemed to have that effect on people. Hard to be bright and shiny in the middle of a kill zone."

"Self doubt is a self-fulfilling prophecy."