“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...”

“In writing, a good guy must never break any of the Ten Commandments. A bad guy must break every one. That's why writing female characters is so much fun. They're not GUYS at all.”

“I sort of got off on making bad guys sweat. Which was not unlike my love of making good guys sweat, just by very different means.”

“No one just starts giggling and wearing black and signs up to become a villainous monster. How the hell do you think it happens? It happens to people. Just people. They make questionable choices, f...”

“War is what happens when language fails.”

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

“The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.”