“When half the town, law enforcement included, has paid the woman in question for an ‘adult evening,’ it’s almost impressive how quickly she loses credibility.”

He was unhinged. Shameless. Everything wrong and everything right. And he held the key to my cage in his palm.

I may be unhinged, but I’m constantly working to channel my urges. It never stops, the self-restraint, the need for more.

It’s just a question. A question whose answer no longer has the power to hurt me.

Maybe I’ve dragged myself through the mud since then, but even mud hardens beneath your shoes. I must be standing on a mountain of it by now. And no one can touch me from way the hell up here.

Heartache is my constant companion, and we’re perfect for one another. Two co-dependent peas in a pod. My past and my future.

Gifts are meant to be wrapped. Honestly, it’s basic etiquette.

Hatred’s the fuel that keeps me alive.

I quickly learned I needed someone who specifically enjoyed, or at the very least could take it, when I hit that point of blinding release. Every time, I lost all sense of the control I work so hard at maintaining.

We have no use for people who don’t want to be here.

Doesn’t he know I want everything? And in return, I’ll give him all of me.

Crawl inside this body, find me where I am most ruined— love me there.

Like I’m a puzzle to be worked out and he’s got all damn day.

Maybe she’d try to understand that the dark images muddled my brain until it hurt, until I had no choice but to let them out.

All the hardest, coldest people you meet were once as soft as water. And that’s the tragedy of living.

There’s nothing more dishonest than words.

Do not judge my story by the chapter you walked in on.

My impression about the Panama Canal is that the great revolution it is going to introduce in the trade of the world is in the trade between the east and the west coast of the United States.

We’re trying to impress ourselves in a way. That’s why we keep trying to do things better. We never get satisfied.

Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness.

The impressions of childhood are never obliterated.

Perhaps men who cannot love passionately are those who feel the effect of beauty most keenly; at any rate this is the strongest impression women can make on them.

I don’t have to put up a front to impress anyone.

The Rosary offers an easy way to present the chief mysteries of the Christian religion and to impress then upon the mind.

I didn’t have familiarity with children. I’m learning day after day, with her [daughter]. And what impresses me the most is that she, Deva, is an individual person. But in miniature, she seems to be a special effect.