Quotes from Libba Bray

The King of Crows raked his fingers across the dark until it bled. He licked the blood from his fingers with a forked tongue. "People will believe anything, you know. You only need them to be frightened enough.

For a brief while, the women ask us questions: are we looking forward to our debuts? Did we enjoy this opera or that play? As we give our slight answers, they smile, and I cannot read what is behind their expressions. do they envy us our youth and beauty? Do they feel happiness and excitement for the lives that lie ahead of us? Or do they wish for another chance at their own lives? A different chance?

It wasn't my doing. It is the drink and the laudanum and the opium and that bloody refusal to live. That selfish grief. I thought I could change it with magic, but I can't. People will be who they are, and there is not enough magic in any world to change that.

Why was his grief more powerful than his love? Why couldn't he find it within himself to fight back? Why am I not enough to live for?

SPENCE, THAT DOUR, IMPOSING LADY EAST OF LONDON, has grown a friendly face in my absence. I've never been so happy to see a place in all my sixteen years. Even the gargoyles have lost their fierceness. They are like wayward pets who haven't the sense to come in from the roof and so we let them live there, glaring but cheerful.

It was a machine that required constant feeding- Henry hated the machine, and he hated himself for wanting the sort of admiration it promised, as if he had no worth unless someone was there to applaud it

The man in the shop peered disapprovingly at Evie through the glass. She pumped her arms and legs up and down in imitation of a marching band, gave the man a salute, and continued her meandering walk to the museum.

A token of bathroom stoner etiquette.

What's the difference between an undead and my last boyfriend? One is a soul-sucking beast from hell and the other is an undead.

In this life, you have to work with people you dislike. You find compromises. But sometimes you find that a person's beliefs are so harmful that you must speak against them. You can't let such harmful statements stand without challenge. They have a tendency to grow into tumors.

With a low bow, she is gone in a haze of roses and hope

I've been thinking about that book about the boys who crash on the island....Lord of the Flies what about it....You know how you said it wasn't a true measure of humanity since there were no girls and you wondered how it would be different if there had been girls...Maybe girls need an island to find themselves. Maybe they need a place where no one's watching them so they can be who they really are.

I am staring into the hissing face of a cobra. A surprisingly pink tongue slithers in and out of a cruel mouth while an Indian man whose eyes are the blue of blindless inclines his head towards my mother and explains in Hindi that cobras make very good eating.

my mom's al like sparkle sparkle sparkle and I'm all like sparkle yourself

The world's most bada** Viking yard gnome is on the counter by the cash register using a dinner plates as a shield and a steak knife as a sword

Unspeakable nightmares surround the men now. They would scream if they could. It's no use. The dream has them, and it will not relinquish its hold. Ever. Back in their beds on Mott Street. the men's bodies go limp. But behind their closed lids, their eyes move frantically as, one by one, they are pulled deeper and deeper into a nightmare from which they will never, ever wake.

I am a lot of things, not all of them noble.

Often, the monsters we create in our imagination are not nearly as frightening as the monstrous acts perpetrated by ordinary human beings in the aim of one cause or another.

Bitches will take your ass down if you try to publish that. Peace out.

We've got about as much chance of communing with the dead as we do of sitting in Parliament.

That's totally their interpreter, a girl with a lip ring informs us. Even though they totally record their music in English, they totally speak in Inuktitut. Totally.

You can never really know someone completely. That's why it's the most terrifying thing in the world, really - taking someone on faith, hoping they'll take you on faith too. It's such a precious balance, it's a wonder we do it at all.

I feel like I swallowed a Magritte. Like on the inside, I'm made of clouds and floating eyes, green apples, and slowly rising men in bowler hats. You are officially the most annoying unreal creature ever. Meet a lot of us, do you?

There is no greater power on this earth than story. Will paced the length of the room. People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsense - words. Stories. Myths. Lies. Promises. History.