Nenia Campbell Quotes - Page 2

In trials of ir'n and silver fain“The dead will rise and walk again“The blesséd few that touch the light“Will aid the war against the night.“But one by one they all will die“Without a cause to rule them by“As Darkness spreads across the land“He'll wield the oceans in his hand.“Five warriors will oppose his reign“And overthrow the Shadow Thane“They come from sides both dark and light“The realm the mortals call “twilight.”“A magus crowned with boughs of fire“Will rise like Phoenix from his pyre“A beast of shadows touched with sight“Will claim a Dark One as her knight“The next, a prophet doomed to fail“Will find her powers to avail“The final: one mere mortal man“Who bears the mark upon his hand“The circle closes round these few“Made sacred by the bonds they hew“But if one fails then so shall all“Bring death to those of Evenfall.
Nenia Campbell
Without ethics, science would be cruelty.
Nenia Campbell
Understanding did not provide solace or make the pain go away; in many ways, understanding was just more salt in the emotional wound. Ignorance allowed one to fight back with unfettered cruelty. Understanding inspired empathy, which led to guilt, as well as suffering.She looked at Gavin, supine, unconcerned, contented, and thought that perhaps there was something to being a sociopath. If you didn't have a heart, it couldn't be broken.
Nenia Campbell
Ask yourself what a man without guile might do to your body in the dark.
Nenia Campbell
Don't tell me it's going to fucking be okay! I am not okay with being that fucker's pinata!
Nenia Campbell
It takes many sheep to satisfy one wolf.
Nenia Campbell
There was something delightfully intimate about the relationship between predator and prey.
Nenia Campbell
I cannot breathe, or see, nor swim,My darkness is composed of him.
Nenia Campbell
If I catch you, I might do anything. I might strip the skin from your bones as I drain you dry. Or I might drag you into my chambers and have you pleasure me in ways you cannot even imagine. I might even take mercy on you, and that would be the cruelest injustice of all, because for you, it would only be a temporary reprieve.
Nenia Campbell
That's what I fear: being subtracted from myself. Negation. Forced against my will to become a beast.
Nenia Campbell
We're all hunters in my family, you know. Deer, ducks…damsels.
Nenia Campbell
I feel I could kill. I feel that I might like it. And I know that this should scare me. But it doesn't. It excites me. I am in Plato's cave, watching the shadows and fraught with the desire to hunt what casts them.
Nenia Campbell
You are fifty different kinds of twisted.""Only fifty? Val, you wound me.
Nenia Campbell
Sometimes evil didn't need an excuse. Sometimes evil just was.
Nenia Campbell
If evil had a laugh, she thought it would sound like his.
Nenia Campbell
What once was had, forever lost; thy fate is destined, thy love star-crossed.
Nenia Campbell
As if I'd had time to drug it in the two milliseconds she'd let me out of her sight.
Nenia Campbell
Be careful what you wish for. Especially out loud.
Nenia Campbell
We hunger in earnest for that which we cannot consume.
Nenia Campbell
He was a phoenix of blood, rising from the ashes of those who had fallen and suffered before him.
Nenia Campbell
Her world fragmented into dozens of sharp, cutting shards, shedding the salty blood and saltier tears that ringed the bitter cocktail of her despair. She was caterpillar and butterfly, both, caught in a cocoon of raw nerves and open sores; she was insanity, wrapped up in the thin, transient wrappings of a temporary lucidity; and she was afraid, because an innate desire lay in the bottom reaches of her psyche for the very poison that was killing her.
Nenia Campbell
I bask in that sympathy because it's nice to have somebody who cares, even if it's the wrong person for the wrong reasons.
Nenia Campbell
You think you're superior to the others, don't you? We'll you're not. In fact you're worse for mistaking basic human decency for moral superiority.
Nenia Campbell
...there was a difference between killing for nourishment and killing for curiosity or sport.
Nenia Campbell
Come closer, my dears, let me give you a warning,Of the fate that befalls those who stay out past morning,In the darkest hours before the dawn,When witches roam and demons spawn,And children die with spirit gone,Magicked away in the gloaming.
Nenia Campbell
Fire and water, logic and reason—those footholds of reality that you mortals hold so near and dear become like so much mist on the plains of the dreamscape.
Nenia Campbell
In a fight between a shifter and a witch, the shifter would often win—but only if they could keep the witch from speaking, usually by severing the throat or tearing out the tongue. If the witch was powerful enough, and quick enough, physical size didn't matter. Catherine had heard of the horrible ways the witches could kill their victims. Cooking them alive from the inside out, restricting oxygen flow through the nasal and oral passages by creating a vacuum, drowning them with vapor pulled from the very air.It made fights between shifters look almost humane by comparison.
Nenia Campbell
Men who thought of themselves as gods fell the farthest, and the hardest.
Nenia Campbell
Books make the best ersatz friendships.
Nenia Campbell
Everyone needs to escape sometimes, and retreating into somebody else's fantasy isn't nearly as satisfying as slipping into your own.
Nenia Campbell
There's a saying that you can't put a price on a human life, but that saying is a lie because we have. We have, and it's so much lower than you would think. Yes, human life has its price like anything else, and will continue to do so for as long as it doubles as a commodity.
Nenia Campbell
Nobody should have to choose between a cold heart and a dead heart.
Nenia Campbell
Power is a fickle mistress, easy to seduce, but even easier to lose. That's how it works. One moment she is your closest confidant, whispering the secrets of the universe into your ear; the next, she is your vilest oppressor—and once her ears close to your plights you are well and truly screwed.
Nenia Campbell
The Lord teaches forgiveness, but some things are unforgivable.
Nenia Campbell
When we mated I felt your heart stop beating and it was as if the world had stopped turning. It was only while surrounded by death that I realized I had never felt more alive.
Nenia Campbell
Knowing and doing are two separate things, and don't always sync up in life.
Nenia Campbell
Once upon a time, there was a naïve and innocent girl who thought she could tame the beast and live happily ever after. But the beast did not want to be tamed, for he was a beast and beasts care not for such things, and the girl died along with her dreams.From childhood's grave sprang a young woman, jaded before her years, who knew that beasts could wear the skins of men, and that evil could exist in sunlight, as well as darkness.Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Nenia Campbell
Words were the bane of her existence. She drowned in them when all she wanted was silence, only to have them recede when one desperately-sought phrase would be the key to her salvation. Most things were like that: excess in times of abundance, and shortages in times of dearth. Life, she realized, was an unbalanced scale, and would never weigh in one's favor, struggle as one might.
Nenia Campbell
Being depressed and suicidal doesn't mean wanting to kill yourself every moment of every day. It may be a fixed obsession, but sometimes it gets relegated to the back of your head. Rather, it means the world takes on the very cut and dry, black and white, unilateral aspect of a flowchart.
Nenia Campbell
I finally understood what could drive kids to show up with guns and shoot up their schools.
Nenia Campbell
It wasn't that she was sad—sadness had very little to do with it, really, considering that most of the time, she felt close to nothing at all. Feeling required nerves, connections, sensory input. The only thing she felt was numb. And tired. Yes, she very frequently felt tired.
Nenia Campbell
Now she knew living was just a brief hiatus, a blip really, in the infinite line of nothingness that composed that shadowy realm of the unknown. It could stop at any time.
Nenia Campbell
Maybe in a way all living things are like flickering flames in a precarious night, always on the verge of being extinguished. Whether we kindle slowly but steadily, or go out in a brilliant burst of light and color, is our choice. Perhaps the most important choice we'll ever have.
Nenia Campbell
If the whole world seems like it's against you, it helps to know that you've still got home. A safe place. It just takes one person—a teacher, a friend, a parent. If I didn't have you and Dad, if you hadn't made it so clear you loved me as much as you did, or if you'd said, 'yeah, why don't you do it, and put yourself out of our misery, just shut up,' I would have killed myself. I really would have. I spent most of those days wishing I were dead anyway, and what always stopped me was the fact that doing so would destroy the lives of the only people who ever cared about me.
Nenia Campbell
So you thought you could shit and eat at the same time. How disgustingly convenient.
Nenia Campbell
I was supposed to be powerless, and as a result they failed to see that I possessed claws.
Nenia Campbell
Since when did psychiatry become one big, fat Myspace survey?
Nenia Campbell
At first you might wonder what you did to deserve such treatment. Nothing, probably, so that doesn't matter. What matters is that, eventually, the abuse becomes the status quo. It's no longer about the whats and whys (“what did I do?” “why are they doing this?”) but the whens and hows (“when are they going to do it?” “how are they going to get me?”). Persecution becomes inevitable, inescapable. And once you get into the victim mindset, you're fucked. The bullies don't even need to hurt you now; your poor, warped, pathetic brain is doing half the work for them.
Nenia Campbell
People rarely ventured outside the realm of their own hurts. They believed their own suffering was obvious to all, but might as well have been wearing blinders for all that they noticed anyone else's.
Nenia Campbell
College had once been my greatest aspiration; it stood for everything my mother did not—intellectualism, feminism, freedom. But being kidnapped had given me plenty of time to think, and somewhere between all that fear and dread, I'd realized that was the wrong reason to go to college. That the potential for those things had been inside of me all along, only I'd never realized because I hadn't believed myself strong enough to break free without an intermediary.
Nenia Campbell
I'd seen entire constellations of possibility I'd never previously been aware of, so blinded had I been by the bright, glaring stars of expectation. Freedom, I was beginning to think, had less to do with where you were, and was more about who you were trying to be.
Nenia Campbell
Mámá was fond of saying that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels—an aphorism I was pretty sure she'd cribbed from the thinspiration sites she subscribed to online—but I believed that anyone who said such things had never tasted chili-cheese fries with melted cheddar, fresh ground beef, and Tapatio sauce.
Nenia Campbell
Girls can fight with swords, too. Sometimes, even better than men can. They just have to want it badly enough that they're willing to work harder at it.
Nenia Campbell
Valys also didn't think I was good enough for him. He made that clear every time he acted like a martyr forced to settle. But what he didn't understand was that if he thought I might not be good enough for him, he definitely wasn't good enough for me. I was well aware of my flaws, but I knew my merits, too; I shouldn't have to be anyone's second-best. Least of all, his.
Nenia Campbell
Maybe it frightened them, to admit that a woman could be master of her fate.
Nenia Campbell
If a woman defined herself solely by the man she was with—and vice versa—the world would be a very shallow and insipid place, indeed.
Nenia Campbell
Death is one lover who cannot be spurned.
Nenia Campbell
Did you think I'd only want you once? Oh, my, you are more naïve than I thought. Why would I go through so much trouble for a mere tryst? Does a man ride a stallion but one time before condemning it to the abattoir?
Nenia Campbell
I want to be your last thought at night, and your first taste at dawn.
Nenia Campbell
Conquest was not satisfying if it began with a surrender.
Nenia Campbell