"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!"

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

"Fear and doubt are major stampeders."

"He is my vulnerability."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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 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."

"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."

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

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

"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?"

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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 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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"When anything is possible, how do you choose?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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!"

"Love hath no pride."

"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."