Fuck your manners."" You don't have to settle for just my manners.

— 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

Happiness is such a fragile thing, isn't it? So easily burst, like a bubble blown by a child, and always on the verge of being carried away.

— Nenia Campbell

Hatred is about possession. It is all-consuming, cruel, and vainglorious. When love is allowed to fester, it becomes twisted and corrupt; it settles deep in the heart...and metastasizes, sending its dark roots through the body to raze all that stands in its way. Love is chaste and pure. Love is banal.... No, hatred has infinitely more possibilities.

— Nenia Campbell

Hatred is as easy as slipping on a well-worn woolen cloak. If only it provided the comfort of one.

— Nenia Campbell

He acted like a libertine of Europe with a genteel Southern propriety—and had all the morals of an emotionless psychopath. The two former masked the latter, like leaves covering a snare. You didn't notice the steel jaws until they were impaled in your flesh, and by then it was already far too late to run.

— Nenia Campbell

He kissed her, and the magic that had been building up steadily around them exploded, raining down in arcs of silver fire that made her half-remember a prophecy from her d

— Nenia Campbell

Hello, Mrs. Tran... I have David's homework. And if you ever want to see it again, you'll pay me the two million dollars I asked for.

— Nenia Campbell

Heritage was everything: it was a golden skeleton key, gleaming with power, able to get the wielder through any number of locked doors; it was the christening of the marriage bed with virgin blood on snow-white sheets; it was the benediction of a pristine pedigree, refined through ages of selective breeding and the occasional mercy culling. It was life, and death, and all that spanned between. It was his birthright.

— 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