Life doesn’t come with an eraser. Experiences leave their mark, for better or for worse. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never been hurt.

Knowing and doing are two separate things, and don’t always sync up in life.

Did you think I’d only want you once? Oh, my, you are more naïve than I thought. Why would I go through so much trouble for a mere tryst? Does a man ride a stallion...

For a moment, the cardboard sets come crashing down to reveal that squalling monster, reality, locked up in the confines of its man-made cage. It is a fearsome thing, beautiful, inherent only to itself. Faced...

If evil had a laugh, she thought it would sound like his.

Everything’s just fucking Disney with you.

If you’re so keen on me being healthy then you should have no problem accepting me for the way I am. That’s what’s healthy, Mom. Not being focused on all this freaky weight-loss stuff.

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.

But then, if if sex were the same thing as math, a lot more people would be lining up to take calculus.

Like X-Box. And X-rated movies.

Valys also didn’t think I was good enough for him. He made that clear every time he acted like a martyr forced to settle. But what he didn’t understand was that if he thought I...

He was everything your mother warned you about when she told you not to walk alone in the dark.

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

My gun turned back into a pumpkin.

She had come into the garden expecting summer roses and had instead been caught in a bank of twisted, thorny, frostbitten vines.

Isn’t that just typical. You’re either asking for it, or having it forced upon you without your consent. Who decided women always have to be passive in sex?

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.

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

Too bad. Game over. Insert new fucking quarter.

I’d seen entire constellations of possibility I’d never previously been aware of, so blinded had I been by the bright, glaring stars of expectation. Freedom, I was beginning to think, had less to do with...

You want to be free. You also want to be mine. You can’t be both.

I want to be your last thought at night, and your first taste at dawn.

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...

You are fifty different kinds of twisted.””Only fifty? Val, you wound me.

I’m more than a few neurons shy of a synapse right now, and it feels absolutely fan-fucking-tastic.

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.

Once a flower is picked it immediately begins to die.

I participate in BDSM, but I wasn’t abused as a child. I don’t hate women, or particularly enjoy hurting women. Sometimes I make them feel pain, but it’s consensual, it serves a purpose—to get them...

I hope you nail the bastard.”So does he.

Lisa blamed Twilight, and the preconceived notions about men (especially dangerous men) that it tended to form in the impressionable adolescent mind.

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

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

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

I’m going to fuck you up until your mother bleeds.

The concept, maybe. But in literature? That’s like ordering a glass of tap water at a bar.

I cannot breathe, or see, nor swim,My darkness is composed of him.

Mámá 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...

Time can be as fluid as water, and never in the way you’d like; it slows down to a standstill when you wish you could get things over with, and rushes by in a blur...

The amount of sympathy you get from having an illness is paid out like a Ponzi scheme and psychiatric disorders are all the way at the bottom.

Psychological imprisonment was no less uncomfortable than its physical counterpart. In some ways, it was even worse; it provided the illusion of physical freedom, but garnered none of the benefits of it.

Conquest was not satisfying if it began with a surrender.

…there was a difference between killing for nourishment and killing for curiosity or sport.

I feel I could kill. I feel that I might like it. And I know that this should scare me. But it doesn’t. It excites me. I am in Plato’s cave, watching the shadows and...

It ain’t polite to taste people. Shit.

We feel most alive when we are closest to death.

What do you want to do with your life, then?” is often the question I’m asked.To be honest, I don’t know. I really don’t.Mainly because I don’t see myself living long enough for that to...

In my experience, the romance novels written about BDSM have about as much in common with actual BDSM relationships as a child playing with a jump rope.

Ça va. Nap time is over.

So you thought you could shit and eat at the same time. How disgustingly convenient.

Understanding did not provide solace or make the pain go away; in many ways, understanding was just more salt in the emotional wound. Ignorance allowed one to fight back with unfettered cruelty. Understanding inspired empathy,...