"The truth is messy. It's raw and uncomfortable. You can't blame people for preferring lies."

"You can break a thing, but you cannot always guide it afterward into the shape you want."

"Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first."

"I'm afraid my voice is going to break. I am afraid she is going to hear how much this hurts."

"Lie until even you believe it - that's the real secret of lying."

"I will guard you from Death, for I have no fear of him."

"I'm sorry,' she said to each of the dead as she unzipped and unfastened their things, 'I'm sorry Courtney. I'm sorry Marcus. I'm sorry Rachel. I'm sorry Jon. I'm sorry I'm alive and you're dead. I'm sorry I was asleep. I'm sorry I didn't save you and now I'm taking your things. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

"Dead or not, I have come for his heart and I will have it."

"Three of them, dressed in silvery gray, on three horses-one black, one white, and the third red."

"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."

"I know how to be the witness to her grief. I don't know how to be this kind of villain."

"When Tana was six, vampires were Muppets, endlessly counting, or cartoon villains in black cloaks with red polyester lining."

"I can learn to live with guilt. I don't care about being good."

"We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be."

"Clever as the Devil and twice as pretty."

"He must have been handsome when he was alive and was handsome still, although made monstrous by his pallor and her awareness of what he was. His mouth looked soft, his cheekbones as sharp as blades, and his jaw curved, giving him an off-kilter beauty. His black hair a mad forest of dirty curls."

"You said you were allowed to lose it,' some part of her reminded herself. 'Not yet, not yet."

"Tana would sit near the door to the basement with fingers in her ears, tears and snot running down her face as she cried and cried and cried. And little Pearl would toddle up, crying, too. They cried while they ate their cereal, cried while they watched cartoons, and cried themselves to sleep at night, huddled together in Tana's little bed. 'Make her stop' Pearl said, but Tana couldn't."

"Can't get away from your own self."

"She loves the serene brutality of the ocean, loves the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air."

"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."

"I need to stop fantasizing about running away to some other life and start figuring out the one I have."

"What an author doesn't know could fill a book."

"They wore their strange beauty like war paint."

"I thought you were her knight, but you have become only her woodsman--taking little girls into the forest to cut out their hearts."

"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."

"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."

"She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone -- desire so acute that it became despair."

"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?"

"Mutually assured destruction."

"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 wonder about death, I who may never know it. It looks much like ecstacy, the way they open their mouths as they drown, the way their fingers dig into your skin. Their eyes are wide and startled and they trash in your hands as though with an excess of passion."

"I survive at the edge of friends circles."

"I think there are a lot of really positive aspects to social media for novelists. Even though our work is pretty solitary, through Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and Instagram and blogging in general, we're better able to connect directly with readers."

"I really love the idea of the poetically mad - the character that is imbued with the romantic madness. Like River from 'Firefly' or Drusilla from 'Buffy.' Someone dangerously unhinged, where you're really not sure they're going to be reliable minute-to-minute."

"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."