Sleeping is terrifying.When you close your eyes and surrender your consciousness to the void, you lose yourself—voluntarily—and you’re trustingly assuming you’ll find yourself back out of the labyrinth again.Usually you do.But sometimes you don’t.It’s that...

He acted like a libertine of Europe with a genteel Southern propriety—and had all the morals of an emotionless psychopath. The two former masked the latter, like leaves covering a snare. You didn’t notice the...

All friends have secrets. We’re like three-dimensional shapes on paper; we all have hidden sides. And there’s some secrets we don’t even reveal to ourselves.

Why do women always feel they have to settle for less?

She seemed like the kind of woman who would fall in love with the sky.

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

People only picked the pretty, sweet-smelling flowers. The ones with thorns were left alone.

You couldn’t find your dick in the dark, you scheming, sleaze-mongering scumwad.

Why did this keep happening? Why her? Perhaps there was some pheromone certain people omitted, perceivable only on a wavelength unique to those individuals who preyed on them.

You wanted to see me, Professor?

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

You can lie in any language on earth, and body language is no exception.

When mothers warn their daughters about all the cold nasty men out there who will only break their tender little hearts, I’m the one they’ve got in mind because I’m the one who broke their...

There is no redemption in a cruel man’s love.

All statistics have outliers.

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 dangerous.They would be irresistible.

Ask yourself what a man without guile might do to your body in the dark.

Nothing is as deadly as the love of a powerful man.

It takes many sheep to satisfy one wolf.

Remember how it feels, Silent One. That murderous rage, and how it makes your blood boil. Remember, and let it carry you the rest of the way—only, learn to freeze it, as well, because the...

Some things are not supposed to be forgotten; these are the things which make us human.

Books make the best ersatz friendships.

They said the shape-shifters fucked with the enthusiasm of animals—if they didn’t devour you with the enthusiasm of one first.

He kissed her, and the magic that had been building up steadily around them exploded, raining down in arcs of silver fire that made her half-remember a prophecy from her dreams.One by one, they all...

Being depressed and suicidal doesn’t mean wanting to kill yourself every moment of every day. It may be a fixed obsession, but sometimes it gets relegated to the back of your head. Rather, it means...

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 —...

Hello, Mrs. Tran…I have David’s homework. And if you ever want to see it again, you’ll pay me the two million dollars I asked for.

Subjugation requires vigilance; if you relax your brutality even for a moment, the people you’re oppressing will revolt at the first sign of weakness. That’s why dictatorial regimes are always a slippery slope of cruelty...

No, darlin. It’s an I-hope-you-weren’t-planning-on-sleeping-alone-tonight.

If the whole world seems like it’s against you, it helps to know that you’ve still got home. A safe place. It just takes one person—a teacher, a friend, a parent. If I didn’t have...

The Lord teaches forgiveness, but some things are unforgivable.

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

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...

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

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.

I had a fucking standing ovation going on in my goddamn pants, and it was demanding an encore.

What once was had, forever lost; thy fate is destined, thy love star-crossed.

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...

Ignorance must be a fun place to live; my parents seem to vacation there year-round.

Maybe that was the root of my dislike for her: she had what I wanted, which earned her my jealousy, and since I was ashamed of myself for wanting it, my scorn, as well.

We always vilify what we don’t understand.

A quick and brutal fuck from behind usually served as an effective reminder of where you stood in the pack hierarchy.

A geas was a contract with the goddess of Fate. Sometimes one was born indentured, other times it was bestowed upon one as a curse. Because if one did not fulfill the terms of one’s...

It wasn’t that she was sad—sadness had very little to do with it, really, considering that most of the time, she felt close to nothing at all. Feeling required nerves, connections, sensory input. The only...

I wasn’t a complete bastard. If she liked to think she saw good in me, if she wanted to take credit for it, I’d let her. She deserved that much.

You mean you don’t want to come in and hold my hand while I piss?

All lines are gray in the dark.

Darlin, you don’t even know how to pleasure yourself.

Heritage was everything: it was a golden skeleton key, gleaming with power, able to get the wielder through any number of locked doors; it was the christening of the marriage bed with virgin blood on...

We hunger in earnest for that which we cannot consume.