Karen Marie Moning
Dude, got eyes? I'm collecting evidence." [...] "In Ziploc bags." "I think they're Glad." "They look impartial to me.Collection: Eye
I realized early in my career that precisely what one reader doesn't like is what another reader loves. Collectively, any writer's audience presents a mishmash of expectations that can never all be met. What one-tenth of my readership may not be crazy about the other nine-tenths savors. The moment you start altering a book or a painting or any type of art as if it's a public collaborative, you crucify its soul. I'd rather irritate a few people and delight a lot than touch no one." ~ Karen Marie MoningCollection: Art
You believe in God? Dude. Only God could have created physics.Collection: Believe
I love music because it's so fecking brilliant. Music is math, and math is the structure of everything and pretty much perfect.Collection: Math
I couldn’t move. It’s something I’m still ashamed of. You always wonder how you’ll handle a moment of crisis; if you’ve got what it takes to fight or if you’ve just been deluding yourself all along that somewhere deep inside you there’s steel beneath the magnolia. Now I knew the truth. There wasn’t. I was all petals and pollen. Good for attracting the procreators who could ensure the survival of our species, but not a survivor myself. I was Barbie after all.Collection: Moving
Yesterday was a memory. Tomorrow was a hope. Today was another day to live and do one's best to loveCollection: Memories
He didn't just occupy space; he saturated it. The room had been full of books before, now it was full of him.Collection: Book
Nobody looks good in their darkest hour. But it's those hours that make us what we are. We stand strong, or we cower. We emerge victorious, tempered by our trails, or fracture by a permanent, damning fault line.Collection: Strong
Don't lose yourself to anger. It's gasoline. You can burn it as fuel, or you can use it to torch everything you care about and end up standing on a scorched battlefield, with everybody dead, even you-only your body doesn't have the good grace to quit breathingCollection: Breathing
I was a twenty-two-year-old single white female alone in a strange country where my sister had been killed.Collection: Country
Even now, my back was still arched with sensual invitation, my bottom was questing up like a cat in heat, and my every move was supple, sinuous. I was one great big come-hither.Collection: Moving
Now you know how I justify my addictions—if I can pay less for it than I would at Wal-Mart, I get to have it.Collection: Addiction
He looked as if he'd stepped straight off the cover of one of those romance novels she ordered from Amazon.com so she didn't have to be embarassed by some supercilious male clerk in the bookstore.Collection: Romance
It seemed Barrons had finally gotten his cake and eaten it too.Collection: Cake
I can't help but see myself in them. The Seelie are who I was before my sister died. Pink, pretty, frivolous Mac. The Unseelie are who I've become, carved by loss and despair. Black, grungy, driven Mac.Collection: Loss
He wasn't handsome. That was too calm a word. He was intensely masculine. He was sexual. He attracted.Collection: Handsome
Hard. Fast. Deep. When I'm done you'll know you're mine.Collection: Done
You've been doing something bad since the moment you met me, lass.Collection: Moments
Barrons has something the rest of us don't have. I don't know what it is, but I feel it all the time, especially when we're standing close. Beneath the expensive clothes, unplaceable accent, and cultured veneer, there's something that never crawled all the way out of the swamp. It didn't want to. It likes it there.Collection: Clothes
Pretty girls don't have ugly mouths.Collection: Girl
How does it feel, MacKayla? You have a piece of me in your mouth. Would you like another?Collection: Doe
Jericho Barrons was my poison now.Collection: Poison
Distinguish yourself [...] in an age where girls often make themselves too available to boys, by making him work a little for your attention. He'll think he's won a prize when he gets it, and he'll work that much harder to keep it. Boys turn into men and men put a premium on what's hard to get.Collection: Girl
Sometimes the small pleasures in life are the sweetest.Collection: Small Pleasures
I was adrift in a sea of questions and if answers were lifeboats, I was in imminent danger of drowning.Collection: Sea
Safety is a fence, and fences are for sheep. I would rather die at twenty-two, knowing the truth, then live in a cage of lies for a hundred years.Collection: Lying
Like is an emotion. Emotions”—he raised a hand, made a fist, clenched it tightly—“are like holding water. You open your hand, there’s nothing there. Better to be a weapon than a woman.Collection: Hands
Like a horse, honey, somebody's gonna break you.' 'Never. Going. To. Happen.Collection: Horse
You were firing questions at me today, trying to get inside my head. You asked if I believe in God. I told you of course I do - I've always had a strong sense of selfCollection: Strong
Is anyone who's supposed to be dead actually dead?Collection: Supposed To Be
Fire to my ice. Ice to my fever.Collection: Fire
There was no lifeboat here in these deep, killing waters, not even a lighthouse, marking the way back to shore with its soft amber promise. There was only the storm of Barrons and the one I seemed to be, and if there were dark shapes moving in the waters beneath my feet that I should probably take a good hard look at and possibly reconsider trying to swim here, I didn’t care.Collection: Moving
I have found there to be little distance between the unlatching of a chain and the spreading of a woman’s legs. As if they can never unbar only a single entrance. It’s a disease called hope. Women suffer from it greatly.Collection: Distance
If he were any other man, I might have suspected him of substance abuse, of being coked up or something. But Barrons was too much a purist for that; his drugs were money, power, and controlCollection: Men
Being nearly naked around Barrons felt a lot like going to a shark convention lightly basted in blood.Collection: Sharks
Nuns? They'd take one look at Barrons and decide the devil himself had come knockng. He not only looked dangerous, he emanated something that made even me feel like crossing myself sometimes, and I'm not religious.Collection: Religious
All those 'bloodys' was a veritable cornucopia of emotion for Barrons.Collection: Emotion
His coworker was velvety-skinned, a sexy boy-on-the-cusp-of man.Collection: Sexy
Goor or evil, right or wrong, he mattered to me.Collection: Evil
It leaned forward, elbows on its knees, all amusement vanishing from its features, leaving its chiseled visage quietly regal, dignified. "I give you my word, Gabrielle O'Callaghan," it said softly. "I will protect you." "Right. The word of the blackest fairy, the legendary liar, the great deceiver," she mocked. How dare it offer its word like it might actually mean something? A muscle leapt in its jaw. "That is not all I have been, Gabrielle. I have been, and am, many things." "Oh, of course, silly me, I left out consummate seducer and ravager of innocence.Collection: Liars
And after I act as your intermediary and he takes you back to Faery, then what?" "Then all will be made right, and I'll be invincible again." She rolled her eyes. "I meant, what happens to me? While you may be the most important thing to your egotistical little self in your narcissistic little world, guess what— so am I in mine.Collection: Eye
At the very last moment, just before its lips claimed hers, its grip on her face relaxed slightly and she did the only thing she could think of: She head-butted it. Snapped her head back, then forward again, and bashed it square in the face as hard as she could. So hard, in fact, that it made her woozy and gave her an instant migraine, making her wonder how Jean-Claude Van Damme always managed to coolly continue fighting after such a stunt. Obviously, movies lied.Collection: Fighting
Life's not linear at all. It happens in lighting flashes. So fast you don't see those lay-you-out cold moments coming at you until you're Wile E. Coyote, steamrolled flat as a pancake by the Road Runner, victim of your own elaborate schemes.Collection: Pancakes
Werewolves? Oh please, just plain stupid. Who wants to get it on with a man ruled by his inner dog?Collection: Dog
I've learned a thing or two from Barrons: Power is sexy. It shapes my spine, infuses my beckoning hand. I have not been devastated by Barrons' death. The alchemy of grief has forged a new metal. I have been transformed. There's only one way I can make his death okay. Undo it.Collection: Sexy
The battle had been invisible to the naked eye, but the hardest ones are.Collection: Eye
As she lifted the glittering strand of diamonds from the box, a small slip of paper fell out. She caught it as it wafted toward the floor. Four words in ancient script, an arrogantly slanted scrawl. Accept these, accept me. Well, she thought, blinking, that was certainly direct and to the point. -Adam's note to GabrielleCollection: Paper
There was pain, but there was also joy. It was in the tension between the two that life happened. Imperfect as it was, this world was real. Illusion was no substitute. I'd rather live a hard life of fact than a sweet life of lies.Collection: Sweet
Flirtation doesn't have to go somewhere; it certainly doesn't need to end up in bed. I like to think of it as a little friendlier than a handshake, a little less intimate than a kiss. It's a way of saying hi, you look great, have a wonderful day. A tasteful flirtation, played out people who understand the rules, leave everyone feeling good and can perk up the bluest mood.Collection: Kissing