“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 ...”

“Maybe it frightened them, to admit that a woman could be master of her fate.”

“But fairytales were, at best, dirty mirrors whose warped and pitted surfaces reflected a highly distorted view of the truth, quite different from reality.”

“Psychological imprisonment was no less uncomfortable than its physical counterpart. In some ways, it was even worse; it provided the illusion of physical freedom, but garnered none of the benefits ...”

“They said the shape-shifters fucked with the enthusiasm of animalsif they didn't devour you with the enthusiasm of one first.”

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

“You can't live in dread of something for long without beginning to crave it.”

“Thin ribbons of fear snake bluely through you like a system of rivers. We need a cloudburst or soothing landscape fast, to still this panic. Maybe a field of dracaena, or a vast stand of sugar pine...”

“The image of the "presence," whatever it was, waiting there for him to go--this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have...”

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't li...”

“I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us.”

“Fear is all in the mind”

“In order to survive in a world of instinct,its' alternative is to hunt or being hunted.Reject this, then be prepared to be hunted.”

“You can be the hunter, or you can be the hunted.”