Dreamfever (Fever #4)

by Karen Marie Moning

When the walls come tumbling, tumbling down, that’s the question that matters. Who are you?

I’m massively suspicious of that word. It means to accept without question.

Still, weapons are weapons, and all weapons are good weapons.

It infuriated me. It was one more danger I had to watch out for. Dark Zones were bad enough. Now I had IFPs: Interdimensional Fairy Potholes

We’re alike that way. We see things the way they are, not the way folks want us to believe they are or how we wish they were.”

Don’t confuse intensity of emotion with quality of emotion, baby, when I’d gotten tangled up with class heartbreaker Tommy Ralston. The more he’d hit on my girlfriends, the harder I’d worked to keep him. It was like I was addicted to whatever made me feel most intensely, even though it was hurting me. Pain is not love, Mac. Love makes you feel good.

“Don’t lose yourself in anger, Mac. It’s gasoline. You can burn it as fuel, or you can use it to torch everything you care about and end up standing on a scorched battlefield, with everybody dead, even you—only your body doesn’t have the good grace to quit breathing.”

Strength wasn’t about being able to do everything alone. Strength was knowing when to ask for help and not being too proud to do it.

Life’s an ocean, full of waves. All are dangerous. All can drown you. Under the right circumstances, even the gentlest swell can turn tidal. Hopping waves is for the weekend warrior. Choose one, ride it out. It increases your odds of survival.

If I ignored the knife he’d just driven through my heart, maybe it would go away.

Life didn’t explode in the sunshine and pretty places. Life took the strongest root with a little bit of rain and a whole lot of shit for fertilizer. Although love could grow in times of peace, it tempered in battle. Daddy told me once—when I’d said something about how perfect his relationship with Mom was—that I should have seen the first five years of their marriage, that they’d fought like hellions, crashed into each other like two giant stones. That eventually they’d eroded each other into the perfect fit, become a single wall, nestled into each other’s curves and hollows, her strengths chinking his weaknesses, her weaknesses reinforced by his strengths.

“Did he bother pointing out that everything the king had done, he’d done for her? Did she think of that before she decided to kill herself? Did it ever occur to her that sometimes a willingness to turn dark for someone else might just be a fucking virtue?”

It’s funny how, when things seem the darkest, moments of beauty present themselves in the most unexpected places.

There’s comfort in knowing your limits. It’s a safety zone. Most people find theirs, get in it, and stay there for the rest of their lives. That’s the kind of life I thought I was going to live.

There’s a fine line between being stupid and knowing you have to test your limits if you want to do any real living at all.

The person who truly lives has precious few moments of safety, learns to thrive in any kind of storm.

the heart had reasons of which reason knew nothing,

Regardless of how many people I surrounded myself with, no matter how many friends and family I loved and was loved by in return, I was alone at the moment of being born and at the moment of dying. Nobody came with you and nobody went with you. It was a journey of one.