"Books make the best ersatz friendships."

"She said my glasses made me look like a butch jock's locker room bitch."

"That's life. Life is the ultimate game, and its rules were made to be broken."

"There was something delightfully intimate about the relationship between predator and prey."

"Everyone needs to escape sometimes, and retreating into somebody else's fantasy isn't nearly as satisfying as slipping into your own."

"You want to be free. You also want to be mine. You can't be both."

"I finally understood what could drive kids to show up with guns and shoot up their schools."

"Happiness is such a fragile thing, isn't it? So easily burst, like a bubble blown by a child, and always on the verge of being carried away."

"Máma was fond of saying that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels—an aphorism I was pretty sure she'd cribbed from the thinspiration sites she subscribed to online—but I believed that anyone who said such things had never tasted chili-cheese fries with melted cheddar, fresh ground beef, and Tapatío sauce."

"I am the rightful ruler of this world And now that I, too, have awakened, like my dragons, I have come to take back what is mine."

"If a woman defined herself solely by the man she was with-and vice versa-the world would be a very shallow and insipid place, indeed."

"All statistics have outliers."

"It takes many sheep to satisfy one wolf."

"Fuck your manners.""You don't have to settle for just my manners."

"You may have bought my body, you may even have the papers to prove it, but don't fool yourself into thinking for a moment that my heart and mind were included in the purchase."

"Nobody wants to believe that existence carries on without at least taking a stumble from their departure of this world."

"Did you think I'd only want you once? Oh, my, you are more naA ve than I thought. Why would I go through so much trouble for a mere tryst? Does a man ride a stallion but one time before condemning it to the abattoir?"

"If you don't feel the same way about him, if you're just leading him on, you need to tell him that. I've seen too many nice guys get shafted because a girl can't get over some jerk."

"Crazy people always think they're perfectly sane. It's what makes them so crazy, their entire delusion lies within the fact that they believe they aren't deluded."

"This softening she sees in me isn't enough to make me affectionate, but it's just enough to render me inept. I can't give her what she wants - virtuousness - or what she needs - protection."

"Death is one lover who cannot be spurned."

"He was a phoenix of blood, rising from the ashes of those who had fallen and suffered before him."

"Her world fragmented into dozens of sharp, cutting shards, shedding the salty blood and saltier tears that ringed the bitter cocktail of her despair. She was caterpillar and butterfly, both, caught in a cocoon of raw nerves and open sores; she was insanity, wrapped up in the thin, transient wrappings of a temporary lucidity; and she was afraid, because an innate desire lay in the bottom reaches of her psyche for the very poison that was killing her."

"Maybe that was why the French called orgasms "las petites morts: because the things that bring us passion tend to slip past our defenses, to creep insidiously into every facet of our consciousnesses and kill us as ruthlessly, and efficiently, as any drug."

"As if I'd had time to drug it in the two milliseconds she'd let me out of her sight."

"Vampires are fond of their games. But the games that They play are different than the variants that I'm familiar with. The rules were made to be bent, broken, shattered-and somebody always gets hurt.Always."

"In some ways blowjobs are better than sex because when you have a mouthful of cock you can't make snide comments."

"Life's a party. So smile and eat shit and pretend it's fucking caviar."

"We hunger in earnest for that which we cannot consume."

"Girls can fight with swords, too. Sometimes, even better than men can. They just have to want it badly enough that they're willing to work harder at it."

"Humanity is a cage, and our puritanical sensibilities comprise the bars. We are confined by our own reason and intellect, and yet most of us don't even know it."

"College had once been my greatest aspiration; it stood for everything my mother did not-intellectualism, feminism, freedom. But being kidnapped had given me plenty of time to think, and somewhere between all that fear and dread, I'd realized that was the wrong reason to go to college. That the potential for those things had been inside of me all along, only I'd never realized because I hadn't believed myself strong enough to break free without an intermediary."

"All right, she said a little sarcastically. "I was going to assume you liked eating babies and sacrificing virgins, but I might as well ask, what do you do for fun?"I languish in sin, I replied in the same tone. "I take my babies rare, and my virgins over easy."

"You will not mock me-and you will let me finish. I have owned and lost a kingdom, and I have battled death. I have been through all that, and I will not chase after you like some lovesick poet spouting verse. If you wish to call me yours, then you will have to act as if you are mine. On the front of surrender, there is no middle ground."

"At first you might wonder what you did to deserve such treatment. Nothing, probably, so that doesn't matter. What matters is that, eventually, the abuse becomes the status quo. It's no longer about the whats and whys ("what did I do? "why are they doing this?) but the whens and hows ("when are they going to do it? "how are they going to get me?). Persecution becomes inevitable, inescapable. And once you get into the victim mindset, you're fucked. The bullies don't even need to hurt you now; your poor, warped, pathetic brain is doing half the work for them."

"I'm as lucky as a bed of oysters on cioppino night."

"Be careful what you wish for. Especially out loud."

"You are my star and you have made me see, he tells her, "and I am the air beneath your wings, never rending, never ending."

"There's a saying that you can't put a price on a human life, but that saying is a lie because we have. We have, and it's so much lower than you would think. Yes, human life has its price like anything else, and will continue to do so for as long as it doubles as a commodity."

"Fear could drive one to violence as quickly as anger could."

"Maybe it frightened them, to admit that a woman could be master of her fate."

"Once upon a time, there was a naïve and innocent girl who thought she could tame the beast and live happily ever after. But the beast did not want to be tamed, for he was a beast and beasts care not for such things, and the girl died along with her dreams. From childhood's grave sprang a young woman, jaded before her years, who knew that beasts could wear the skins of men, and that evil could exist in sunlight, as well as darkness. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose."

"We always vilify what we don't understand."

"Fire and water, logic and reason-those footholds of reality that you mortals hold so near and dear become like so much mist on the plains of the dreamscape."

"Hatred is as easy as slipping on a well-worn woolen cloak. If only it provided the comfort of one."

"You are the playground of which I have free reign."

"A lot of people have it in for me. It's practically a school sport."

"Nobody should have to choose between a cold heart and a dead heart."

"I am waltzing with death, flirting with him, but he stands there smiling and saying nothing because he does not need to woo or be wooed: he knows he gets us all in the end."

"The villains were always ugly in books and movies. Necessarily so, it seemed. Because if they were attractive-if their looks matched their charm and their cunning-they wouldn't only be dang."