Karen Marie Moning Quotes

Women fight differently from men. You couldn’t get me to hurt a woman’s breasts for anything. I know how tender my own are when I’m PMSing. Besides, we feed babies with them.
Karen Marie Moning
The single greatest advantage anyone can take into any battle is hope.
Karen Marie Moning
I'd never understood why anyone would want to live forever. It had always seemed to me that death lent life a certain poignancy, a necessary tension.
Karen Marie Moning
I wept for me, for my sister, for things I couldn't even begin to put into words, and might never be able to explain. But it felt something like this: I used to walk on my feet. Now all I knew how to do was crawl. And I wasn't sure how long it was going to take for me to get up off my knees and regain my balance, but I suspected that when I did, I would never walk the same way again.
Karen Marie Moning
One of the first lessons a warrior is taught is that denial of one's circumstances only results in failure to recognize real danger.
Karen Marie Moning
He is my vulnerability
Karen Marie Moning
I kept it to remind me that although there is evil, there is sometimes beauty and light. You, Jillian. You were always my light.
Karen Marie Moning
And there you have it...if I knew that I could only have a few nights in that man's arms or nothing, I would take those magic nights and use them to keep me warm for the rest of my life.
Karen Marie Moning
Your race devotes itself to justifying its errors, not correcting them
Karen Marie Moning
Then why was his tongue in your mouth? Was he conducting a clinical test of your gag reflex?" He smiled, but not nicely. "How is your gag reflex, Ms. Lane? Are you a hair trigger?"Barrons likes to use sexual innuendo to try to shut me up. I think he expects the well-raised southern belle in me will think eew and back off. Sometimes, I do think eew, but I don't back off. "I'm a spitter, if that's what you're asking." I flashed him a too-sweet smile."Didn't look that way to me. I think you're a swallower. His tongue was halfway to China and you were still taking it.""Jealous?
Karen Marie Moning
Why did you laugh right before you lost consciousness.”“Death’s an adventure. I lived big. Rigor mortis makes your face stick. So, who knew how to thaw me?”“Death’s an insult.”“At least an affront,” I agree.
Karen Marie Moning
I’ve never paid any attention to time. Dancer says I’ve enjoyed a luxury most people never have. He hates clocks and watches and everything that has to do with time. He says people already have too many lost days and that most folks live in the past or the future but never the present, always saying stuff like “I’m unhappy because ‘X’ happened to me yesterday, or I’ll be happy again when ‘Y’ happens to me tomorrow.” He says time is the ultimate villain.
Karen Marie Moning
Velvet looks horrified. “If you are fool enough to address King R’jan, you will do it thus and in no other manner! ‘My King, Liege, Lord, and Master, your servant begs you grant it leave to speak.’”“Wow. Totally delusionary there.”“Good luck with that,” Ryodan says. “She doesn't beg to speak, or do anything else. You can lock her up, down, and sideways and it’s never going to happen.”I beam at him. I had no idea he thought so highly of me.
Karen Marie Moning
He was sexual in a way that made women think of deeply repressed fantasies therapists and feminists alike would cringe to hear tell of.
Karen Marie Moning
She was tipping her head back to inquire, when two men entered the great hall and the question flew right out of her head. They were simply two of the most gorgeous men she'd ever seen. Twins, though different. They were both tall and powerfully built. One was taller by a few inches, with dark hair that swept just past his shoulders and eyes like shard of silver and ice while the other had long black hair falling in a single braid to his waist, and eyes as gold as Adam's torque. They were elegantly dressed in tailored clothing of dark hues, with magnificent bodies that dripped with raw sex ap
Karen Marie Moning
I am going to love you now, slow and sweet, but when you come, I'm going to f*** you the way I need to. The way I've been dreaming about since the moment I saw you.
Karen Marie Moning
But he didn't need to seek visual confirmation of what he'd just heard to know she had. And the truth was, he couldn't blame her. He'd not have let her die, either. He'd have moved mountains. He'd have battled God or Devil for his wife's life. She'd betrayed him. He smiled faintly.
Karen Marie Moning
Lust is a thing of the blood. Doesn't need head or heart.
Karen Marie Moning
I think sex with him might undo my essential cellular cohesion.
Karen Marie Moning
Fine. Okay. I killed her. But I didn’t mean to. And I didn’t kill her, kill her.”“Oh, I see. As long as you didn’t kill her, kill her, then that’s okay.
Karen Marie Moning
When you were too young and naïve to see the risks, I incurred your wrath to protect you. Scream at me for it if you must. Thank me for it when you finally grow up.
Karen Marie Moning
And there, my dear Fio, you make one of Womankind's greatest mistakes: falling in love with a man's potential. We so rarely share the same view of it, and even more rarely care to achieve it.
Karen Marie Moning
Now it's not just my lip you'll be needing to kiss if you're wishing to make amends with me, Irish.
Karen Marie Moning
One day you may kiss a man you can’t breathe without, and find breath is of little consequence.”“Right, and one day my prince might come.”“I doubt he’ll be a prince, Ms. Lane. Men rarely are.
Karen Marie Moning
She shrugged, looking as baffled by it as he felt. "I don't know. I wonder sometimes if people even know what love is anymore. Some days, when I'm watching my friends change lovers as unperturbedly as they change shoes, I think the world just got filled with too many people, and all our technological advances made things so easy that it cheapened our most basic, essential value somehow," she told him. "It's like spouses are commodities nowadays: disposable, constantly getting tossed back out for trade on the market and everyone's trying to trade up, up--like there is a 'trading up' in love." She rolled her eyes. "No way. That's not for me. I'm having one husband. I'm getting married once. When you know going in that you're staying for life, it makes you think harder about it, go slower, choose really well.
Karen Marie Moning
Anyone worth knowing breaks once. Once. No shame, no foul if you survive it. You did.
Karen Marie Moning
Love hath no pride.
Karen Marie Moning
When anything is possible, how do you choose?
Karen Marie Moning
He had a come-and-get-me-baby-I'm-pure-trouble-and-you're-gonna-love-it kind of attitude.
Karen Marie Moning
We stand strong, or we cower. We emerge victorious, tempered by our trials , or fractured by a permanent, damming fault line.
Karen Marie Moning
She loves. And she doesn't know how to pull it back when you have to, because sometimes you sure as feck have to. Got to grab it up with both hands and pull it back before somebody turns into knives and uses it to cut you to pieces.
Karen Marie Moning
A lamb in a city of wolves.
Karen Marie Moning
I'm the one who will always watch over you. Always be there to fuck you back to your senses when you need it, the one who will never let you die. I pull my shirt over my head and kick off my shoes. "What more could a woman ask?
Karen Marie Moning
In my experience, anybody besides your mom that feeds you is going to want something in exchange for it.
Karen Marie Moning
I lay my head on his chest and listen to his heart beating, solid and sure.....he reads me so well. He's known about my emotional empathy since we were children. Nothing disturbs him...Few can lie to me... I don't know the truth, only that there is a lie. It takes a scrupulously honest man to love me. That's my Sean. We learned to trust each other completely before we were old enough to have learned suspicion.
Karen Marie Moning
I have studied humans for a small eternity. Intent infuses their every movement. Road maps to their inner navigation, plastered all over their skin. Born to be slaves.
Karen Marie Moning
You both talk too much,” the kid says. “Shut up. Don’t make me tell you again.”We shut up, which I find hysterically funny.
Karen Marie Moning
Don’t lose yourself in anger, Mac. 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 breathing.
Karen Marie Moning
It's our actions that define us. What we choose. What we resist. What we're willing to die for.
Karen Marie Moning
Most people are good and occasionally do something they know is bad. Some people are bad and struggle every day to keep it under control. Others are corrupt to the core and don’t give a damn, as long as they don’t get caught. But evil is a completely different creature, Mac. Evil is bad that believes it’s good.
Karen Marie Moning
The wound you refuse to dress is one that will never heal. You gush lifeblood and never even know why. It will make you weak at a critical moment when you need to be strong.
Karen Marie Moning
One day you do meet a man who kisses you and you can't breathe around it and you realize you don't need air.
Karen Marie Moning
It's hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash. I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows she the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it.
Karen Marie Moning
Life is too hard, too much to handle. Nobody told me there’d be days like these. How could nobody tell me there’d be days like these? How could they let me grow up like that—happy and pink and stupid?
Karen Marie Moning
Barrons: "He got upset it wouldn't shut up and tore its head off."Mac: "The child?" I gasped
Karen Marie Moning
When he kisses me again, the last part of me that could stand myself dies.
Karen Marie Moning
Life took the strongest root with a little bit of rain and a whole lot of shit for fertilizer.
Karen Marie Moning
Men. Do they all evade as first line of defense?
Karen Marie Moning
I looked from one to the other, and realized that Barrons and my dad were having one of those wordless conversations he and I have from time to time. Though the language was, by nature, foreign to me, I grew up in the Deep South where a man’s ego is roughly the size of his pickup truck, and women get an early and interesting education in the not-so-subtle roar of testosterone.
Karen Marie Moning
...When a man first awakens, it sometimes takes several moments before he starts thinking clearly.""And here I thought it took several years, perhaps a lifetime for the average man's intellect to kick in.
Karen Marie Moning
You loved me.”It wasn’t a question, but he answered it readily. “I do. More than life. My heart. I didn’t just pick a sweet turn of phrase to name you, but spoke from my soul when I named you thus. Without my heart I couldn’t live. And I couldn’t breathe without you.”“Are you a man who has more than one heart?”“Nay. Only this one. But it’s bitter and dark now from the pain I’ve brought you.
Karen Marie Moning
I see how he feels about his world and I want to be one of the parts he prizes. I want to be worth fighting for. Worth the same kind of effort he puts into the things that matter to him. Like Dani.”"I don’t tell her no human matters to the boss like Dani.
Karen Marie Moning
Grief shared was grief lessened.
Karen Marie Moning
Missing Alina was worse than a terminal illness. At least when you were terminal you knew the pain was going to end eventually. But there was no light at the end of my tunnel. Grief was going to devour me, day into night, night into day, and although I might feel like I was dying from it, might even wish I was, I never would. I was going to have to walk around with a hole in my heart forever. I was going to hurt for my sister until the day I died. If you don't know what I mean or you think I'm being melodramatic, then you've never really loved anyone.
Karen Marie Moning
Tuatha De do not walk the human realm alone. Actually, they don't walk alone much anywhere. Only the occasional rogue Fae will do so.""Like yourself?""Yes Most of my kind have no fondness for solitude. Those who walk alone are not to be trusted.""Really," she said dryly. "Except for me," he amended, with a faint, insouciant grin.
Karen Marie Moning
She waited, thinking you were different from those who used and betrayed her. She believed you would find her, come charging to her rescue. That belief was as misplaced as the monsters we faced were deadly. The day came she finally lost her faith in you, and I was there as I’ve always been there when she needed me.
Karen Marie Moning
It's what you choose to believe that makes you the person you are.
Karen Marie Moning
Failure is always new information, and those who are willing to suffer it repeatedly make it a stepping-stone to success.
Karen Marie Moning
He calls me his Queen of the Night. He shows me the wonders in this incredible city. He encourages me to find my own way, and to choose what I think is right or wrong.And the sex, God, the sex! I never knew what sex was until him! It’s not soft music and candlelight, a choice, a deliberate action.It’s as involuntary as breathing, and as impossible not to do. It’s slammed up against a wall in a dark alley, or flat on my back on cold concrete because I can’t stand one more second without him. It’s on my hands and knees, dry-mouthed, heart-in-my-throat, waiting for the moment he touches me, and I’m alive again. It’s punishing and purifying, velvet and violent, and it makes everything else melt away, until nothing matters but getting him inside me and I wouldn’t just die for him—I’d kill for him, too.Like I did tonight.
Karen Marie Moning
As he fills me, I wonder if—in the same way that sex makes its own unique perfume—we don’t really “make” love. As in create, manufacture, evoke an independent element in the air around us, and if enough of us did it really well, for real, not just for the hell of it, we could change the world. Because when he’s in me, I feel the space around us changing, charging, and it seems to set off some kind of feedback loop, where the more he touches me, the more I need him to. Having sex with Barrons sates my need. Then feeds it. Sates, then feeds. It’s a never-ending cycle. I get out of bed with him, frantic to be back in it again. And I—“—hated you for it,” he says gently.That was my line.“I never get enough, Mac. Drives me bug-fuck. I should kill you for what you make me feel.”I understand perfectly. He is my vulnerability. I would become Shiva, the world-eater, for him.
Karen Marie Moning