Quotes from Poppy Z. Brite

This is the point being missed by readers who lament Liquor's lack of hot sex scenes, probably because they aren't old enough to understand that a passionate relationship could be about anything other than sex.

My dad told me that no one could ever make it as a writer, that my chances were equivalent to winning the lottery - which was good for me, because I like to have something to prove.

The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.

There were books about how to be gay; he'd seen them in stores and libraries. Some of them even had diagrams. But there weren't any diagrams about how to fall in love with your best friend and not fuck everything up.

He has ' le coeur comme un artichaud '. Eddy fumbled for her high school French. 'A heart like an artichoke?' ' Oui . He has a leaf for everyone, but makes a meal for no one.

You hold onto what you have; you do not give it up easily, even when you know it is poisoning you.

It was like discovering that your innermost fires and terrors, the things you believed no one else could fathom, were in fact the basis of a recognized philosophy. Some part of you felt intimately invaded, threatened; some other part fell to its knees and sobbed in gratitude that it was no longer alone.

If you want something, you don't wait for the world to deal it out for you. You take it.

Why bother? I was right all along: the second you make yourself vulnerable to someone, they start drawing blood.

When you have too much faith in something, it's bound to hurt you. Too much faith in anything will suck you dry. In this way, all the world is a vampire.

The sky is purple, the flare of a match behind a cupped hand is gold; the liquor is green, bright green, made from a thousand herbs, made from altars. Those who know enough to drink Chartreuse at Mardi Gras are lucky, because the distilled essence of the town burns in their bellies. Chartreuse glows in the dark, and if you drink enough of it, your eyes will turn bright green.

Delete nothing. Move nothing. Change nothing. Learn everything.

I'm your nightmare. Did you think you were done with nightmares, now you've become one?

Maybe they did what they had to do to live, and tried to get a little love and have a little fun before the darkness took them.

At some point you have to start letting people save their own life.

Never relinquish your terrors. That's when they catch you.

If you're ever lucky enough to belong somewhere, if a place takes you in and you take it into yourself, you don't desert it just because it can kill you. There are things more valuable than life.

I press my hands against my chest, wishing I could somehow be even closer to him. I hate skin; I hate bones and bodies. I want to curl up inside of him and be carried there forever.

Horror is the badge of humanity, worn proudly, self-righteously, and often falsely.

But if I die without trying again, I'm a coward. I don't mind having regrets about stuff I've done. It's the regrets about stuff I haven't done that bother me.

Let the night come. We are not afraid.

With the first kiss his mouth will taste of wormwood.

If you're a freelance writer and aren't used to being ignored, neglected, and generally given short shrift, you must not have been in the business very long.

All at once it hit him: this was power too, just as surely as smashing your fist into someone's face, just as surely as putting a hammer through someone's skull. The power to make another person crazy with pleasure instead of fear and pain, to have every cell in another person's body at your thrall.