"I’d said it before and meant it: Alive or undead, the love of my life was a badass."
— Richelle Mead (Blood Promise)

"Okay, God, I thought. Get me out of this and I’ll stop my half-assed churchgoing ways(...)Let me get out of here, and I’ll . . . I don’t know. Donate Adrian’s money to the poor. Get baptized. Join a convent. Well, no. Not that last one. "
— Richelle Mead (Blood Promise)

"'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.'"
— Laurell K. Hamilton (Skin Trade)

"Edward smiled, I smiled, even Bernardo smiled. Olaf just looked sinister."
— Laurell K. Hamilton (Skin Trade)

"... Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you."
— Nelson Algren

"The air was stifling, but he liked it because it was stifling city air, full of excitingly unpleasant smells, dangerous music, and the distant sound of warring police tribes."
— Douglas Adams (So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish)

"'How did you hear about that?'
'Are you kidding me? So far, I had that runt Kyle-'
'I hate him. I hate all vamps. That complete toad, Michael-'
'-tell me you were pregnant by a vamp-'
'kidnnaped me and-Kyle said WHAT?'
'and then a member of the Domi shows up and informs me-'
'The Domi sent someone HERE?'
'-that you're actually pregnant by the late king of the Fey.'
'Late?!' Heidar squeaked."
— Karen Chance (Midnight's Daughter)

"But you know me-I'm an information magpie, always interested in shiny bits of intel. I've never gotten in trouble because of knowing too much."
— T.A. Pratt (Blood Engines)

"'In real life I do violence, but for psychic stuff I do other things better.'"
— Laurell K. Hamilton (Skin Trade)

"Louis-Cesare slowly pulled himself into a half-standing position against the side of the winery.'What? Did you think one little mage was going to do me in?' He swallowed hard. 'Hell, that was just a warm-up.'"
— Karen Chance (Midnight's Daughter)

"The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child's life."
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

"One of my professors once told me that the last official act of the British monarchy was when Queen Victoria refused to sign a law that made same-sex acts illegal. It would have made me think more highly of her, except the reason she objected was because she didn’t believe women would do anything like that. Parliament rewrote the law so it was specific to men, and she signed it. A tribute to enlightenment, Queen Victoria was not. Neither, as I have observed before, are werewolf packs. "
— Patricia Briggs (Moon Called)

"I figured even the most jaded and cynical inhabitant might report a bloody girl in a party dress carrying a severed head by its hair."
— Faith Hunter (Skinwalker)

"A city is simply a passel of people packed in a pot like pickles."
— David Detzer (Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War)

"...to forge, out of steel and blood-red neon, its own peculiar wilderness. "
— Nelson Algren

"“Secret Saturdays ought to be required reading at middle schools everywhere. Maldonado gives us both voice and heart. His young characters navigate a challenging world with endearing earnestness, lively style, and a heartening desire for true friendship and dignity.""
— E.R. Frank

"I mean, electric shock? Isn’t that a bit... electric shock-y?"
— Emmett Spain (Old Haunts, A London City Novel)

"Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding— a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted.

There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths."
— Peter Watts (Maelstrom)

"In the matter of prejudice...we are all the same. Goddess and demon, human and monster: none of us understand difference, but at least some of us make the effort to try."
— Liz Williams (Snake Agent)

"In their simplicity and directness [neon signage is] a kind of urban iconography with which we can identify on many levels. — Rudi Stern"
— Philip Di Lemme (American Streamline: A Handbook of Neon Advertising Design)

"I'm not a goddamned faith healer! I don't talk to God! I'm a mechanic and her goddamned engine was broken!
--Joanne "
— C.E. Murphy (Urban Shaman)

"Then he turned his attention to the other one. He kicked and stopped on Scar-Face, turning her to jelly. He relished every breaking bone, every shattered rib, and every ruptured organ. He laughed when one eyeball spurted from it's socket and when shards of broken bones tore through her flesh. Then, still not satisfied, he leaped into the air and jumped up and down on her corpse. Flesh and blood and hair matted between the treads of his shoe. Then he dipped his index finger in her remains, and used her blood to add two more slash marks to the scorecard on his arm."
— Brain Keene- Urban Gothic

"What I struggle with is that every thing excites me, cities, supermarkets, roads, dirt, rubbish, car parks, advertising, people, deforestation, excavation, fires, floods and violence. All of these things can be beautiful, yet I see the damage; the pain the obscenity of everything. When I am in the city, I long for the country the open space around me, yet in the city I enjoy all that goes on around me."
— Teo Ormond-Skeaping

"In merging nature and culture the most successful cities combine such universal needs as maintaining or restoring contact with the cycles of nature, with specific, local characteristics."
— Sally A. Kitt Chappell (Chicago's Urban Nature: A Guide to the City's Architecture + Landscape)

"Who knew? Oftentimes , if you purchase many items at once, you'll get great deals. Find a well-stocked store and come bearing a list of things you're in the market for. Bundle purchases, and bargains ensue."
— Nina Willdorf (City Chic: An Urban Girl's Guide to Livin' Large on Less)

"Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves."
— Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)

"Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves."
— Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)

""This would go a lot easier if you'd stop screaming in pain," Zoe told the muscular man lying beneath her. - Out of the Darkness (she's tattooing him!)"
— Jaime Rush