"If he'd been a girl friend I'd have asked by now, but guy friends are different. Sometimes you have to sneak up on them like some sort of wild animal, no wereanimal pun intended; all men are leery of their emotions, spook them and they'll shut down. If you're careful, quiet, not too eager, sometimes you'll learn more. Of course, sometimes you have to club men over the head with some question to get any sense out of them, but they prefer to speak from a quiet place."

"I held his hand tight, not because of my fear, but because of the pain in his voice. Strangely, worrying about him helped me be less afraid about where we were. Who knew therapy for someone else was the answer all along to my own fear?"

"Fear was like cancer in remission. If you gave in to it, even by an inch, it would flare up again and eat you alive."

"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 rocks. It burns your heart, crushes your soul under weight of mountains. It destroys, and even if you keep breathing, keep going, you die. The person you were moments ago dies, dies in the sound of screaming metal and the impact of one bad driver. Gone. Everything solid, everything real, is gone. It doesn't come back. The world is forever fractured, so that you walk on the crust of an earth where you can always feel the heat under you, the press of lava, that is so hot it can burn flesh, melt bone, and the very air is poisonous. To survive, you swallow all that hate. You push it down inside you, into that fresh grave that is all that is left of what you thought the world would be."

"Sometimes it's not the light in a person that you fall in love with, but the dark. 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."

"it was more like two scared kids huddling in the dark when they knew the monster under the bed wasn't just real, but was holding a grudge."

OK, her Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels are starting to get better. *happy dance* I'm really enjoying this book. You can read chapters 1-6 here:

http://www.laurellkhamilton.org/Anita/TheHarlequin.html