A Treacherous Curse (Veronica Speedwell, #3)

by Deanna Raybourn

I had long since discovered upon my travels that men are largely the same no matter where one encounters them. And if one is prepared to let them discourse on their pet topics of conversation, one can generally get on with things quite handily without any interference.

John left everything else in his life when he found it dull or it lost its charm for him. He is not a steady sort of man.”

my dad

Still he did not look at me, but he reached out and brushed a fingertip over my hand. It was a tiny thing, that gesture, but the whole world was contained within it—gratitude, partnership, understanding. I had taken lovers around the world, more than a score of them at last count, but Stoker was the nearest thing I had ever known to an actual partner. And I knew better than to ask him for what he could not give.

What repelled her was to me the greatest part of him.

He had walked through hellfire and back again and she saw only the scorch marks whilst I saw the phoenix.

You are so determined to believe that your wounds make you less than human that you think yourself a monster when others are merely men.

I thought at some point in my life, I would have a great love like that, a woman fashioned by the gods just for me, as I had been made just for her, that we would find each other. I always believed she was waiting for me. But I did not wait for her. I married a base metal when the gods had promised me gold.”

“Because there is no power on earth that could make me abandon our friendship. There is no deed you could confess so dark that it would make me forsake you. You said of us once that we were quicksilver and the rest of the world mud. We are alike, shaped by Nature in the same mold, and whatever that signifies, it means that to spurn each other would be to spit in the face of whatever deity has seen fit to bring us together. We are the same, and to leave you would be to leave myself. Make of that what you will.”