“If it is true that nature abhors a vacuum, then criminality regards it as a business opportunity.”

“He became merely the broken statue of a beast, now without another's fear to animate it.”

“I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all read...”

“When one encounters enough strangeness, then what is strange ultimately becomes familiar.The mind can accommodate itself to almost anything, given time: pain, grief, loss, even the possibility that...”

“Once upon a time for that is how all stories should begin there was a boy who lost his mother.”

“We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).”

“Being a vampire is not a curse. Its a disease, Tessa filled in. But they still cant enter hallowed ground, then? Does that mean theyre damned? That depends on what you believe, said Jem. And wheth...”

“Woe to the soul which God rejoiceth to punish! . . . . Is it not a terrible thing to a wretched soul, when it shal lie roaring perpetually in the flames of hell, and the God of mercy himself shall ...”

“Was this what she had shattered convention for; broken with her family, her friends? Everything she had ever known; doomed herself to eternal damnation, for the sake of what she had believed would ...”

“Whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others. We must all carry our share of the misery which lies upon the world.”

“I do believe God gave me a spark of genius, but he quenched it in misery.”

“We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same con...”