“Love is a luxury.""No. Love is an element."An element. Like air to breathe, earth to stand on.”

“She craved a presence beside her, solid. Fingertips light at the nape of her neck and a voice meeting hers in the dark. Someone who would wait with an umbrella to walk her home in the rain, and smi...”

“Happiness. It was the place where passion, with all its dazzle and drumbeat, met something softer: homecoming and safety and pure sunbeam comfort. It was all those things, intertwined with the heat...”

“It was brave," countered Issa. "It was rare. It was love, and it was beautiful.”

“She'd spoken of their happiness as though it were an undeniable fact, no matter what happened--apart from everything else and not subject to it. It was a new idea for him, that happiness wasn't a m...”

“I...I sang," she whispered, "if that matters," and Karou felt her heart pulled to pieces. This Misbegotten warrior, fiercest of them all, had crouched in an icy stream bed to sing a chimera soul in...”

“We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.”

“But these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around--they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, ...”

“You guys know about vampires? You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? Theres this idea that monsters dont have reflections in a mirror. And what Ive always thought isnt that monsters d...”