Laurell k. hamilton quotes

And the moment you care that much, a man has you. He owns a little piece of your soul, and he can beat you to death with it.

That was the true terror of love, that you could love with your whole heart, your whole soul, and lose both

You cannot die of grief, though it feels as if you can. A heart does not actually break, though sometimes your chest aches as if it is breaking. Grief dims with time. It is the way of things. There comes a day when you smile again, and you feel like a traitor. How dare I feel happy. How dare I be glad in a world where my father is no more. And then you cry fresh tears, because you do not miss him as much as you once did, and giving up your grief is another kind of death.

Remember your personal demons should be afraid of you, because you are their home, their food, and as you heal, their executioner.

I locked the door, for what good it would do me, and went to bed. The Browning Hi-Power was in its second home, a modified holster strapped to the headboard of my bed. The crucifix was cool metal around my neck. I was as safe as I was going to be and almost too tired to care. I took one more thing to bed with me, a stuffed toy penguin named Sigmund. I don't sleep with him often, just every once in a while after someone tries to kill me. Everyone has their weaknesses. Some people smoke. I collect stuffed penguins. If you won't tell, I won't.

Seventy percent of a first draft is garbage and 30 percent is gold, but you have to write 100 percent to get that 30.

That disapproving look was back in her eyes. Her teacher face. The one that could make you squirm from ten paces, even if you were innocent. And I hadn't been innocent for years.

Walking your path doesn't mean you don't hurt, it means the pain is worth the progress. Sometimes you have to break something down in order to remake it, and that includes yourself, or it did for me. There were moments when I wept for an easier road, but in the end I would not trade my path for anyone else's. It is mine and the traveling of it has made me who I am, and continues to shape and remold me into the best, happiest, most productive, most playful me, I've ever been.

If you're open to it, New Orleans will teach you about yourself, but if you want to hide from who you really are, the city will help you do that, too.

Some days you go bear hunting and you get eaten. Some days you come home with a nice rug to roll around on, and bear steaks. What they don't tell you as a kid is that sometimes you get the rug and steaks, but you also get some nice scars to go with them. As a child you don't understand that you can win, but that's it's not always worth the price. Once you understand and accept that possibility you become a real grown up, and the world becomes a much more serious place. Not less fun, but once you realize what can go wrong, it's a lot scarier to go hunting "bears".

No name-calling truly bites deep unless, in some dark part of us, we believe it. If we are confident enough then it is just noise.

Larry is back in town...The wedding is set for October. Tammy is threatening to have me in the wedding. Some friends they are.

Love mattered, in the end. A house without love would always fall, maybe not today or tomorrow, but in the end without love nothing could endure.

Money doesn't spend in hell.... The devil deals in a different coin.

Love sucks. Sometimes it feels good. Sometimes it's just another way to bleed.

To just let go, and not pick everything to death. To just let go and enjoy what you had. To just let go and not make everybody around you miserable with your own internal dialogue. To just let go and be happy. So simple. So difficult. So terrifying.

You take insult where none is intended, but if you will find insult where none is meant, then perhaps I should try harder to insult on purpose.

Every relationship is messed up. What makes it really perfect is if you still want to be there when things suck.

Some wounds cut us so deep that they stop us. Stop us from letting go, from growing up, from seeing the truth.

Love, whether it's friendship or more, is like a cup. It fills up drop by drop, until one last drop and the cup is full. The liquid hangs there almost above the rim, hangs there on surface tension alone and you know that one more drop and it will spill over.

But if anything will turn me off, it's a very practiced approach, as if the man has done it a thousand times before, to a lot of different women. Which always seems to imply that I am no different from all the rest. Not flattering.

Patience is a virtue, but there comes a moment when you must stop being patient and take the day by the throat and shake it. If it fights back; fine. I'd rather end up bloody at the end of the day, then unhurt with no progress made, no knowledge gained. I'd rather have a no, then nothing. I'd forgotten that about myself.

You can't save everybody. In fact, there are days when I think you can't save anyone. Each person has to save himself first, then you can move in and help. I have found this philosophy does not work during a gun battle, or a knife fight either. Outside of that it works just fine.

Some moments are perfect, and then someone comes along and f*cks it up. Ain't it always the way.

I have lived for over three hundred years. In that time, the ideal of beauty has changed many times. Large breasts, small, thin, curved, tall, short, they have all been the height of beauty at one time or another. But in all that time, ma petite, I have never desired anyone the way I desire you." - Jean-Claude

I'm learning that you have to make time for what's important. You have to fight to carve little pieces of happiness out of your life, or the everyday emergencies will eat up everything.

Always having to have the last word is a bad trait. Pisses people off.

Only love of a good woman will make a man question every choice, every action. Only love makes a warrior hesitate for fear that his lady will find him cruel. Only love makes a man both the best he will ever be, and the weakest. Sometimes all in the same moment. -Wicked

People are supposed to fear the unknown, but ignorance is bliss when knowledge is so damn frightening.

Feelings are never stupid, they just make us feel stupid sometimes.

I'm more influenced by my own interests than anyone else's. Writers have to entertain themselves, or they can't entertain anyone else

A little boy who's discovered the monster under the bed is actually real, and it's screwing Mommy.

Most hatred is based on fear, one way or another. Yeah. I wrapped myself in anger, with a dash of hate, and at the bottom of it all was an icy center of pure terror.

Nothing is more appealing than a handsome man who is also uncertain of himself.

I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't.

I hate women who complain about being fat when they're like a size 5. Anything under size 5 isn't a woman. It's a boy with breasts.

If you think love makes you happy, you've either never been in love, or never been in love long enough to have to start compromising.

He'd kill you all right. No sweat. But for the wrong reasons. Amateur's reasons. Of course, you'll be just as dead.

I loved him, but love isn't enough. All the fairy tales, the romance novels, the soap operas; they're all lies. Love does not conquer all.

Hope will lie to you, but lust is what it is; it never lies.

Maybe they know what I know, that the true way to a man's heart is six inches of metal between his ribs. Sometimes four inches will do the job, but to be really sure, I like to have six.

We are not created equal in talent. But the place where we are least equal is the heart. You can work at a talent, take lessons, but love, love either works or it doesn't. You love someone or you don't. You can't change it. You can't undo it.

There are a thousand ways to hurt someone you love that have nothing to do with physical violence.

Therapy can get you only so far with exorcising your childhood nightmares; after that it's willpower, and you, and people you can trust to hold your hand along the way.

The best lies are always at least partially true.

I looked at Micah, who shrugged. I looked at Rafael, who shook his head. Nice that none of us knew why he was undressing.

I smiled at him, as Doyle squeezed my hand and I squeezed back. "Some people are addicted to falling in love, Doctor. Some people love that rush of new emotions, and when that first rush of new love is spent, they move on to the next, thinking the love wasn't real. What I felt in her, and potentially in you, is the love of years. Love that knows that that first rush of freshness isn't the real thing. It's the tip of the iceberg.

Never trust people who smile constantly. They're either selling something or not very bright.

Sometimes you fight what you are, and sometimes you give in to it. And some nights you just don’t want to fight yourself anymore, so you pick someone else to fight.

The only true happiness lies in knowing who you are ... and making peace with it.

Give a truly good person power, and they’re still a good person. Give a bad person power, and they’re still a bad person. The question is always about the person in between. The one that isn’t evil, or good, but just ordinary. You don’t always know what an ordinary person is like on the inside.

I will love you always. When this red hair is white, I will still love you. When the smooth softness of youth is replaced by the delicate softness of age, I will still want to touch your skin. When your face is full of the lines of every smile you have ever smiled, of every surprise I have seen flash through your eyes, when every tear you have ever cried has left its mark upon your face,I will treasure you all the more, because I was there to see it all. I will share your life with you, Meredith, and I will love you until the last breath leaves your body or mine.

I spend most of my waking hours confronting and destroying things that I fear. A thousand-year-old master vampire was a tall order, but a girl's got to have a goal.

Zebrowski says that if you killed someone else just hide the body, he's not starting over on the paperwork.

I always treated writing as a profession, never as a hobby. If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will.

People talk of sorrow as if it is soft, a thing of water and tears. But true sorrow is not soft. True sorrow is a thing of fire, and rock. It burns your heart, crushes your soul under the weight of mountains. It destroys, and even if you keep breathing, keep going, you die.

Like most creative people I don't fit well into boxes.

I want a kiss to be so believable it gives the reader shivers.

We are not made up only of our light and happiness but also of darkness and sorrow. To deny the darkness of yourself is to deny half of who you are, and when you love, truly love, you need to love the whole person not just the part that smiles and waves, but the part that thinks murderous thoughts and knows that pain is both pleasure and temptation, but still thinks puppies are really cute.

I'd never met coffee that wasn't wonderful. It was just a matter of how wonderful it was.

The true way to a man's heart is six inches of metal between his ribs." You have to love Anita Blake.

I tended to be hard on the egos of a certain kind of men. The ones who normally swept women off their feet had never moved me much, because I'd always felt that if they swept me off my feet they'd practiced on a lot of women before me, and would practice more with women after me. I'd rarely been wrong on that. ~Anita Blake

I wondered if I had offended him. I wondered if I cared.

Giving up something that no longer serves a purpose, or protects you, or helps you, isn’t giving up at all, it’s growing up.

I try to be a good cop. I try to be a good little soldier and follow orders up to a point. But in the end I’m not really a cop, or a soldier. I am a legally sanctioned murderer. I am the Executioner.

I so wanted out of this conversation, but it was like a car accident: Once you started spinning, you could only wait and see what you hit.

Different isn't evil, it's just different.

You fight so hard, so long, to cut someone out of your heart, but it’s not always your heart that betrays you.

To gain your heart's desire you have to lose some part of your old life, your old self. To do that you have to have courage; without it, you can't make the leap. And if you don't make the leap you have only three choices: You can hate yourself for not taking the chance, you can hate the person from whom you've sacrificed your happiness, or you can hate the one who offered you happiness, and blame them for your lack of courage, convince yourself it wasn't real.

If you fear nothing, then you are not brave. You are merely too foolish to be afraid.

I sipped my own coffee, heavy on the sugar and cream, trying to make up for the late work the night before. Caffeine and sugar, the two basic food groups.

Can the sarcasm,' he said. 'Please, I always use fresh sarcasm, never canned.

True love means you love the real person, not an ideal that you have in your head and superimpose over them. That's illusion and lies to me.

Worry about the things you can control; the rest will either work themselves out, or they'll kill you. Either way, no more worries.

Sometimes you deal with the devil not because you want to, but because if you don't, someone else will.

A girl could never have too much jewelry or too much weaponry.

Being a successful couple was learning what you were willing to compromise on, and what you weren't; learning when to stand your ground, and when to give it up; what was truly important enough to fight over, and what was just you being pissy. You learned each other's hot buttons, the places that hurt, or angered, when you pressed them. Love makes you learn where all the pitfalls are, and how to avoid them, or how to set them off.

It was like noticing the sun. You couldn't help but see it, to turn to face the heat of it, to bask in the glory of it. But often when the sun is high in the sky, the moon is up there, too. A dim memory of what she will be in the night, but there, nonetheless, dim and misty, hard and white. At night, there is only the moon, the sun is nowhere to be seen. There are no distractions when the moon rules the sky.

Some issues stay fresh every time you open them up. It's like evil magical Tupperware -- it stays fresh forever.

Better to assume the worst and be wrong than assume the best and be wrong.

Love is too precious to be ashamed of.

The truth may not set you free, but used carefully, it can confuse the hell out of your enemies.

Fear, the strength of earth's religions, gripping every living soul, Was a monstrous human error for the making of men whole.

One of my rules is never explain. A writer is a lot like a magician, if you explain how the trick works then a lot of the magic turns mundane.

Is death such a high price to pay, when you will die anyway?

There's Only so much emotional super glue in a person's soul, that everything just stays broken.

Is it better to outmonster the monsters or to be quietly devoured?

Nill illigitamus carborundum

a pink taffeta evening gown. It looked like it had run away from a junior high prom... The dress looked like a petunia on steroids to me.

I knew from the moment I heard you, the moment I saw the gun and realized that this lovely, petit woman was the executioner, that you would never die waiting for me to save you - that you would save yourself.

No such thing as a hard woman, Memphis,just soft men. With that, I turned, and the others followed me.

To know another's heart, you must first know your own.

Edward's grief if you die will be a terrible thing. It will hurt him, a lot, and men like him never grieve alone. He will spread his grief all over us, not because we failed, but because it'll give him something to focus on so he doesn't have to feel the pain.

I feel that if you are blessed, or lucky enough, to be doing well, you should help others.

The second you stop questioning yourself is the second that you become the monster. -Merry

Can you truly love anyone if you do not first love yourself? If you hate yourself, can you love anyone else? If you do not accept all of who you are, can you accept anyone else? Hard questions. It remains to be seen whether I get any answers, hard, or otherwise.

There is some comfort in killing that which has hurt you, but it is cold comfort. It'll destroy things inside of you that the original pain wouldn't have harmed. Sometimes it's not a question of whether a piece of your soul is going to go missing, only which piece it's going to be.

Truth could be violent, could strip you of dignity and hope just as quickly as a gun.

Never criticize, unless you can do a better job.

She should have remembered that people have given everything they own, everything they are, to be taken care of, and to have their pain gone. It's the lure of cults: the promise of a good family; it's what people think love is, but love isn't absence of pain, it's a hand to hold while you're going through it.

one of the good things about being a woman is that my level of testosterone poisoning is lower than most men's.

Anything under size five isn't a woman. It's a boy with breasts.

If you love someone, truly love them, you should never cause them pain. Never fill their eyes with something so close to grief.

Hesitation will get you killed.

Death didn't bother me much. Strong Christian and all that. Method of death did. Being eaten alive. One of my top three ways not to go out.

When you spend all your time worrying that the devil is right behind you, eventually you start seeing him whether he's there or not.

My writing style is very sensual, as in sensory detail

Sometimes it's not the optimist you need, but another pessimist to walk beside you.

Here's the secret to finishing that first book. Don't rewrite as you go.

It's not about winning, Haven. I'm not a prize to be won. I'm not the princess that needs rescuing from the dragon. I'm the prince and I kill my own monsters. You need to be ok with that. -Anita Blake

You will never lose your nerve. Your life, probably, but never your nerve.

Men don't settle down because of the right woman. They settle down because they are finally ready for it. Whatever woman they're dating when they get ready is the one they settle down with, not necessarily the best one or the prettiest, just the one who happened to be on hand when the time got to be right. Unromantic, but still true.

There comes a point when you either embrace who and what you are, or condemn yourself to be miserable all your days. Other people will try to make you miserable; don't help them by doing the job yourself.

My father had taught me to be nice first, because you can always be mean later, but once you've been mean to someone, they won't believe the nice anymore. So be nice, be nice, until it's time to stop being nice, then destroy them.

Only those who have never known fear are allowed to think less of others for being afraid. Frankly, I think anyone who has never been afraid of anything in their entire life is either a liar or lacks imagination.

There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.

Before I knew you, I thought brave was not being afraid. You've taught me that bravery is being terrified and doing it anyway.

We hate most in others what we dislike in ourselves.

A person likes to think of himself in a certain way, and when something happens that makes that no longer possible, you mourn the old self. The person you thought you were.

Why is it that most things you might willingly do under other circumstances become distasteful when you have no choice?

I'd killed him in the end, but revenge only makes things all better in the movies. In real life, once the villain is dead the trauma lives on inside the victims.

Sometimes it's not the optimist you need, but another pessimist to walk beside you and know, absolutely know, that the sound in the dark is a monster, and it really is as bad as you think. Did that sound hopeless? It didn't feel hopeless. It felt reassuring. It felt - real.

I am sincere, ma petite, even when I lie.

Rafael, the Rat King, stared at the carnage with black-button eyes. "She is dead." "Ding dong, the witch is dead.

If you love someone, then your freedom is curtailed. If you love someone, you give up much of your privacy. If you love someone, then you are no longer merely one person but half of a couple. To think or behave any other way is to risk losing that love.