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

I would try to tell myself stories to pass the time. Fairy tales. Parts of books. But they got used up.

He reached into the bag and drew out an odd array of manga, ripped paperbacks of books both classic and modern, and a small stack of crumpled magazines. “See, I even brought some things to...

This, the language of deception, we both understand. We were born to it, along with the curses.

Be careful,” Aidan called from the bed. “You don’t know what he might do.” “We all know what you’d do,though, don’t we?”-Gavriel, Tana, and Aidan-page 22-chapter 3

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

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

We all wind up drawn to what we’re afraid of, drawn to try to find a way to make ourselves safe from a thing by crawling inside of it, by loving it, by becoming it.

I survive at the edge of friends circles.

She looks honestly upset, but then, I’ve learned that I can’t read her. The problem with a really excellent liar is that you have to just assume they’re always lying.

Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They’d find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we...

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

You can’t go around making plans that have you getting killed as a by-product. Eventually one of them is going to work.

Telling Sam and Daneca feels like peeling off my own skin to expose everything underneath. It hurts.

I don’t want to be a vampire’ she told herself. But in her dreams, she kind of did.-Tana Bach-page 29-chapter 4

The Anne Rice books are a lot about infection. I read “Interview With the Vampire” a million times when I was in seventh and eighth grade. Also, [writing Gavriel’s backstory] definitely came from those books:...

I wonder if he really could rationalize what I did to him, really treat betrayal like the slight transgression of a recalcitrant business partner. I wonder if I hurt him. If he can rationalize what...

She came out of sleep like a thunderclap—waking from dreams so deep and dark that she couldn’t remember anything but dirt and hands pulling her down into graves with cities inside them.

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’m pretty sure there are some colleges where you can do that. I bet there are some colleges where you can major in that.

Those who really love you don’t mean to hurt you and if they do, you can’t see it in their eyes but it hurts them too.

I thought of how proud he was when he took the marks- cutting the skin of his throat in a long slash and then packing it with ashes until keloid scars rose up.He called it...

Can’t get away from your own self.

As he bent closer, he realized they were words — words his wife had carved into the cave ice with the last of her dying strength. As he read them, he felt them like three...

If curiosity killed the cat, it was satisfaction that brought it back.

Keep going’ she told herself, ‘Don’t look back.’ But she looked anyways.

If you keep it,” Daneca says, “he’ll have his claws in you.”Everyone has their claws in me. Everyone.

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

Books were something that happened to readers. Readers were the victims of books.

Magic gives you a lot of choices,” Grandad says. “Most of them are bad.

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

Yeah, the whole family knows. It’s no big deal. One night at dinner I said, ‘Mom, you know the forbidden love that Spock has for Kirk? Well, me too.’ It was easier for her to...

You and your sister are very dear to each other. To show your regard, you give each other lovely bouquets of lies.

We labor under so many illusions about ourselves until we’re stripped bare. Being infected, being a vampire, it’s always you. Maybe it’s more you than ever before. You, distilled. You, boiled down like a sauce....

Occasionally, there are battles in the sky. One likes to imagine the angels are always triumphant. One does not like to think of the ancient and terrible scales balancing the infernal and divine as wobbling...

Death has his favorites, like anyone. Those who are beloved of Death will not die.

Are you sure?” Aidan asked, “Gavriel’s still a vampire.” “He warned me about you and about them. He didn’t have to. I’m not going to repay that by-” she hesitated, then frowned. “What did you...

She swallowed his blood, a dark vintage from some forgotten cellar. She felt like Persephone in Hades, pomegranate seeds bursting against her teeth, juice rolling on her tongue, and the more she had, the more...

This is the part in the movie where that guy says, “Zombies? What zombies?” just before they eat his brains. I don’t want to be that guy.

Crippled things are always more beautiful. It’s the flaw that brings out beauty.

The only way to end grief was to go through it.

… on the lawn one late summer day, her pale hair tangled because she’d cry if anyone tried to brush it, spinning around and around until she got so dizzy she fell in a pile...

No,” said Luis, “You can’t date the Lord of the Night Court.””Well, I’m not, he dumped me.””You can’t get dumped by the lord of the night court.””Oh, yes, you can. You so completely can.

You can always count on your family to love you. And to betray you. And then to feel guilty about it.

The most important thing for any con artist is never to think like a mark. Marks think they can get something for nothing. Marks think they can get what they don’t deserve and could never...

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

You didn’t think I really liked you? Do you think I really like you now?”He turned toward her, uncertainty in his face.”You did go quite a lot of effort to be having this conversation, but…...

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...

Better to leave him with the memory of their being a pair of monsters, wrapped in each other’s arms.

Mutually assured destruction.