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.”