“He was a phoenix of blood, rising from the ashes of those who had fallen and suffered before him.”

“We spend much of our lives going about completely blind to reality, and yet we still have the gall to act victimized when it invariably catches up to us.”

“That's life. Life is the ultimate game, and its rules were made to be broken”

“He acted like a libertine of Europe with a genteel Southern propriety—and had all the morals of an emotionless psychopath. The two former masked the latter, like leaves covering a snare. You didn't notice the steel jaws until they were impaled in your flesh, and by then it was already far too late to run.”

“The amount of sympathy you get from having an illness is paid out like a Ponzi scheme and psychiatric disorders are all the way at the bottom.”

“You're like a half-tamed creature, still shy of the bridle. 'Except you enthrall me, never shall be free.' But freedom is an illusion, anyway.”

“Sleeping is terrifying.When you close your eyes and surrender your consciousness to the void, you lose yourself—voluntarily—and you're trustingly assuming you'll find yourself back out of the labyrinth again.Usually you do.But sometimes you don't.It's that uncertainty, more than anything, which kills me. That I might not wake up, and wouldn't know it.That I could be dead, dreaming I'm alive.”

“That's how it started: a series of small hurts and excuses between two people that built up slowly, widening over time to form a vast and yawning divide.”

“That's not cruel. This is. You come here in the middle of the night, expecting me to be awake, and ask—no, demand—me to give you things that belong to me as much as they belong to you. Never mind what it does to me. Never mind that each time I see you, I wonder if I'll ever hold you in my arms again, or be able to touch you without you cringing away like I'm a monster. I think it's fair to ask if there's an 'us,' my dear, because I suspect you're trying to use me just now. Tell me that's not cruel, and I'll let you go.”

“It takes many sheep to satisfy one wolf.”

“There was something delightfully intimate about the relationship between predator and prey.”