"He sounded as though he had just seen The Pokey Little Puppy meet the business end of The Little Engine That Could."

"I hate those people who say you always find the one when you stop looking for her. It is the advice you least want to hear when what you think you need most is someone to love. At best, it comes off like being asked to not think of a white elephant. The elephant becomes the only thing you can think of."

"Maybe it is like Pascal's Wager, but I want to believe in the immortality of the soul because consciousness is such a fantastic gift that is feels cruel and unfair to end it so quickly."

"To her, it was like asking a butterfly what it remembered about being a caterpillar. She could fly now and nothing could touch her when she left the cocoon of her body behind at night."

"We need the life. We need to know what we take left someone weaker or dead. It reminds us what we were. The Hunger when you start out, it isn't in the stomach or brain. You want to kill because you hate that others get to live."

"The problem is not that Santa stops existing but that we do. The children we are no longer exist, a fact we do not help through immersing ourselves in the repeating cycle of wake, work, dinner, internet, sleep."

"In the pause that followed, Shane understood why people said their hearts broke. She always thought it was a weak metaphor of strong emotion. She could feel each bit of shrapnel from her heart stab at her stomach and lungs. Her knees gave out beneath her as she heard the voice tell her what she already knew in her fragments of cardiac tissue."

"Like the discovery of most things - love and religion especially - she maintained the child's arrogant wonder than no one had understood it before her and, even if they had, they could not embrace it as passionately as she."

"Magic was not in glitter and sparks. Real magic didn't need to be."

"In an electroencephalogram, one of her seizures was almost identical to an orgasm... Nothing happened during a seizure that couldn't happen outside one, except that Roselyn was not in control of it and it happened all at once. Since then, she had experienced hundreds of orgasms and dozens of seizures and, though she didn't come close to finding the latter nearly as entertaining as the former, it was always in her mind. In the midst of Dryden's often machine gun lovemaking or her own considerably more directed and soft ministrations, it was always in the back of her mind at the moment of climax-this is a tenth of a seizure, this is a fifth of one."

"My students tag tables, walls, and chairs because their greatest fear is that no one will ever remember them. They do not believe they can give impassioned speeches, rally people in protest, paint masterpieces. They think they will die, small and forgotten, and it dictates their every action."

"I cannot let my blood pressure rise because someone wishes to spread his or her bad day around, as if to dilute instead of multiply it."

"The whole concept of some stranger making his way down our chimney - not that we had one - suggested burglary more readily than generosity. Any Santa who tried it would have gotten a bullet in his holly, jolly keister."

"She sat in the silence that resulted in the absence of her words, feeling unburdened but not absolved."

"I get that Christmas is generally schmaltzy. I understand that it is used as a cynical cash grab. I know how far it is from what Jesus would have wanted. Nevertheless, I like that people put forth some effort to see one another during this season, that some people shake out of their commonplace anthood and toward sainthood."

"Everyone you meet is an aspect of the gods and has a lesson to teach you."

"One's first love is the most transformative and least replicable experience. I could love someone else, but it would be its own unfathomable emotion. It would not be this precious, first, spring love. If I cannot love her fully, it will be a love that corrodes within me."

"I cannot deal with obscurity for more than a few decades before I get the worst ache in my chest."

"He dances all night, utterly naked and composed of nothing but six and a half feet of pale sinew. He could dance to a field of crickets, to the sound of rain on a tin roof, to a stampede."

"Aw, so he used you as a penis cozy and then left? Guys are pigs."

"I missed you, she cried into him. Standing on top of the snow gave him an additional few inches on her and she rested her head against his chest. She could hear nothing within, just her own heartbeat echoing."

"The nature of God's plan can be difficult to fathom when you are toiling in some small corner of it, but it is glorious from above, if you allow yourself the perspective."

"We paw at nostalgia even before we hit twenty, wanting a holiday that never happened, a wholesomeness that could not survive in the wild."

"There is a theory that men do not need Paganism because they have endless avenues of societal power available. Why use spells when one can get a bank loan with little trouble? The world already bends over backward to accommodate men, so why perfect the art of magickally shaping it?"

"Vampires did not avoid mirrors because they cast no reflection but because mirrors became so unflattering with the illusion of fuzzy focus wrenched away."

"There was a charm in being reborn into the world when one was old enough to appreciate it."

"If you knew the mercy I am showing by not dismembering you where you stand for getting in my way, you would not stop thanking me."

"Maybe the world didn't need witches and wolves, because the world itself did more to steal away the magic than fantasy ever could. It didn't matter if one was disobedient, foolish, or unlucky, because the worst things just happened."

"Disbelief is the strongest tool in our arsenal."

"They ignored her because of their headphones, a thousand people marching to fifteen hundred different drummers, effectively secluded but for a very basic instinct not to bump into one another. Those that were unplugged rushed from place to place and were never actually anywhere other than "somewhere else."

"She is the sort of person who can do things she doesn't know yet. There are things you know you know and you know you don't know and you don't know you know and you don't know you don't know. She may not know what she does know."

"I don't think I'm being harassed by little green stalkers. I don't know what's really going on, but I'd rather try to eliminate all rational excuses before blaming intergalactic monkeys from the fourth dimension who are somehow interested in this really boring town."

"We may deny the truth of our childhoods while we are living them, but we one day realize the truth of our parents as readily as we do that of Santa. Neither are as perfect as our memories would have them."

"There might have been prettier women in the room but, when she turned those babies on, fluttered her eyelashes, I was hers. It had taken me nearly fifteen years to extinguish their light. Now, when she looks at me, it's a vacuum. I had drained so much from her over the course of our marriage that every glance rips a little bit of my soul away to fill the void I had whittled within her."

"She is so free with herself and so certain of her path, something I now cynically believe only comes from not being aware of the infinite multitude of right paths."

"Within you, within all human beings, is a seed of greatness that makes their kind quake with fear."

"She had seen this relationship dying before it ever lived, but allowed optimism and lust to blind her."

"The Hermit is an important tarot card with much to tell us, but he tends not to be so welcome around the bonfire."

"Love and poor parenting are acceptable topics for any formal meal I make."

"He's very good at chaining girls. He can make cold steel feel like silk."

"Things had improved after he was born. We both loved him with such fervor that it was impossible that some wouldn't splash back on us."

"Pagans earn their reputations for relaxed sexual mores, often in rebellion from the repression of their religions during adolescence. At a Pagan festival, one need only lower one's guard to be offered sex under the cloaking of the sacred."

"Like chocolate, she craved sleep and it made her life brighter, but she could do without."

"The flick of her hip is distilled erotica, a practiced sexuality."

"It is not easy to find someone your size once the Freshman Fifteen turns to the Sophomore Forty or the Senior Sixty. Even when, through some miracle of self-restraint and bulimia, college girls managed to continue to have feminine bodies, so many of these tacky sluts have never heard word one about what fashion entails."

"He never thought he was right. The horror of all that had died under his will had become mundane to him. You see, the first horror is the horror itself. The real horror for him was accepting it as necessary."

"She was not suicidal; that is what people never managed to grasp. Cutting relieved the pressure and stood as some enduring demonstration of her emotion, some way to be in control of a body that could toss her about with seizures. It was borderline artistic to mark her body, chiaroscuro designs in blood. Dying is the last thing she would want, like any healthy organism. A little pain, a small invoked sting trailing her arm, brought her much closer to grounded when she could not keep her head from racing, her thoughts from consuming her with obsession. An ounce of liquid weight loss and she could go back to being herself again. Usually."

"Being certain one is alive isn't something to which one pays mind. If you could ask the question, you were fine. If you could not, hopefully you had a cozy coffin."

"Think about the whole Biblical story of Mary. She wakes up and sees something with a lion, eagle, and human face that wants to inseminate her with the Holy Seed. She's practically a saint just for not killing herself on the spot."

"We are left at the brink of our future each day and the only real choice we have is not to jump but instead make our path through the briar."