Brenna Yovanoff quotes:

The simple truth is that you can understand the way you are. You can know and love and hate it. You can blame it, resent it, and nothing changes. In the end, you're just a part of it.

From the window, I watch the city and the freeway. In the distance, the sky-rises look like mystic spires, unbearably close and far. I want to pick them up and eat them. I want to scream out loud sometimes, but I never do.

I fell headfirst into a sinkhole of pretty things, and the world inside your eyelids is just as big as the one outside.

You presume to name those who have no name. We are pandemonium and disaster. We are the dancing, gibbering horror of the world.

From the window, I watch the city and the freeway. In the distance, the sky-rises look like mystic spires, unbearably close and far. I want to pick them up and eat them. I want to scream out loud sometimes, but I never do."

Once, I ordered two thousand lady bugs from the local garden center and set them loose in the atrium. I sprinkled marigold seeds in the ficus planters and put gold fish in the lobby fountain. These are things I did with no consequences, no repercussions. My nineteen detentions were for smart answers and missed homework. There is no equivalent punishment for making the world a stranger place.

I've never been impulsive. It's always been in my nature to consider things carefully and then decide upon the best solution. Except, sometimes the circumstances change. Sometimes things get so complicated and so bad that your nature just doesn't matter anymore.

The treachery of demons is nothing compared to the betrayal of an angel.

But what Davenport had been born into had taken so much from her, leaving her with just the wickedest and the worst. Her father had given her life, and then taken every scrap of joy or freedom, and even now that he was dead, all he had left her with was a deep, abiding hatred for what she was.

Intention is one of the most powerful forces there is. What you mean when you do a thing will always determine the outcome. The law creates the world.

All my life, I've understood the nature of where I come from, but I never thought it might be wicked until now.

There was so much about our past that I still didn't understand, and I wasn't one to tell the future. I could only tell the way the world worked. History was a tangled thing, people were resilient, and the one constant law of the world was that it would heal.

Why does she always seem to think you drive like we're holding up a bank?"Roswell grinned and rolled his eyes, "Because that's what teenagers do, right? They also carve swastikas into their arms, steal prescription drugs from old people, and freebase cocaine. I need to institute a policy where she stops watching 60 Minutes and pretty much all public service announcements.

Why does she always seem to think you drive like we're holding up a bank?"Roswell grinned and rolled his eyes, "Because that's what teenagers do, right? They also carve swastikas into their arms, steal prescription drugs from old people, and freebase cocaine. I need to institute a policy where she stops watching 60 Minutes and pretty much all public service announcements."

The fact is, the contest has always been invulnerability, and even when you win, you still lose.

I had only to remember that centuries before, men fell in battle for the daughter of Troy, that passions carried greater weight than decorum. It took so little to prove that human life and property are devastatingly temporary. All she had to do was lie down for a prince. They burned the city to the ground.

The new mythology of love was that it bent to the fashion of the day, obligated to take the shape of doves, lilies, jewels. This is a lie. Love is sometimes as passionate as war.

Because I was conceived and born and I grew up. I'm breathing and my heart is beating and as much as it hurts

You're terribly selfish, you know. I've loved you so long, and it was never dear or precious to you. I might as well have not loved you at all."

Why? I say, so quietly that it comes out sounding like a tiny, tired sighNobody wants to be mediocre. Her shadow on the ceiling is monstrous, a witch in profile.

He smiles an honest smile for the first time, and the difference is hard to describe but easy to recognize.

The Cutter leaned toward me, resting his forehead against mine. 'Fool me once,' he whispered, 'shame on you.' He pressed the bridge of his nose against mine, his breath burning the back of my throat. His voice was rough and furious. 'Fool me twice, and I will cut out your fucking throat.

All great acts are ruled by intention. What you mean is what you get.

You asked about love. I don't know about love, Daphne. I just know I don't want anything but you. I don't want to anywhere but with you.

Her gaze was direct, full of a sadness so raw and crystallized that I could see the shape of it. It ringed her pupils in rusty starbursts, but she was grinning--this terrible, ferocious grin. It made her look like she wanted to tear someone's throat out.

I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing.

The things I had were mine and some of them were broken, but they were real. They were so very far from nothing.

People make decisions, and maybe you don't always agree, but those choices are still their own.

It's strange, but seeing something broken is somehow worse when you can tell that it used to be beautiful.

The world is full of unused corners.

Sometimes it doesn't matter how dark the world gets. You can be saved by the smallest thing.

That was the thing about being bereaved. People were overcome with sympathy. They did things for you without even considering whether or not it was the right thing to do.

The hours spool out like a ribbon I can't find the end of.

I wanted it in the way you sometimes want to jump into very cold water, even though you know it won't feel good. I wanted to go numb. To see what it felt like to be someone else.

People do that sometimes. Change.