LILITH SAINTCROW

If something is visceral and unsettling for me, my job is to not look away, not to punk out. Sometimes the dark things come from places inside me, experiences I've had, that need to be transformed.

It's always difficult to say goodbye, especially when one has spent a long time - literally years, in the case of a series - inside a character or two, suffering and celebrating with them.

As much as I devoured comics, I read non-graphic books exponentially more, so I'm not sure I can credit or blame them. Comics, however, taught me a lot about what makes a story arc work and how to bring a story to its natural resting place between issues.

Fight scenes are very physical for me. Sometimes I require my own body to move through them before I can tell where a character's likely to feel it.

What do you say when someone takes on a really bad ass, murdering sucker for you? There just aren't words for that.

The smell of apple pies didn't quite fill the house, but it was there, a thread under everything else. It was kind of hard to take Christophe seriously when he smelled like baked goods. I wondered if other djampjir smelled like Hostess Twinkies and sniggered to myself.

What you cannot escape, you must fight; what you cannot fight, you must endure.

It truly sucks to doubt your friends when you only have one or two of them, I realized.

He stared at his hot chocolate like it held the secret to the universe.

Zombies smell worse than anything you can imagine if you haven’t been hunting things on the dark side of the world. It’s a ripe, gassy odour, like rotting eggs and meat gone bad, crawling blind with maggots. It’s road kill and decayed food and body odour all rolled into one package and tied up with puke.

Christophe's smile was a marvel of edged sweetness. When he grinned like that he looked handsomer than ever, the hint of danger just about threatening to stop a girl's heart.

Would I be as strong as that once I did that thing Christophe was talking about? Blooming? Would I smell like a bakery item? Or was that just him? Did he use pie filling for cologne?

He laughed. The laugh could strip the skin off an elephant in seconds.

It wasn't sarcasm." Graves blew out a cloud of acrid smoke. "It was pointing out a fallacy in your logic, babe." Anna's jaw actually dropped. For a moment, I wasn't sure if I should laugh or push him out of the room. Way to go, Graves.

You're my friend, Danny. You understand? There's no debt between friends." Maybe it's just that the debt gets so high you stop counting it.

Richelle Mead delivers sexy action and tongue-in-cheek hellish humor-if damnation is this fun, sign me up!

And now here he was in my kitchen. Smelling like apple pies and looking at me with a direct seriousness that made him even cuter. The bruising spreading up the side of his face had halted, and under it he was very pretty. Not jock-pretty, or the hurtful kind of pretty that tells you a guy is too busy taking care of his royal self to think about you.

It was stealing her breath, imbecile. Go get a towel." -Christophe, Strange Angels by Lili St. Crow

The only one," he murmured. His chin dipped a little bit. "You know that, Dru? You're the only person who's ever believed in me. You know what that'll do to a guy?" What?"I-" "It makes him want to live up to it.

Oh God, Oh God we’re all gonna die doesn’t really fit the definition of banter, now does it?

Someday, Dante, I will discover how your mind works

What you can't run away from, you have to face

The only place their voices were left was in my head. It was better than being alone but it was so, so lonely.

And you know, I believed him. What girl wouldn't?

I got the idea she'd done her makeup up special for this. Not that she needed much. She was utterly and completely beautiful, except for the hate shining in her eyes.