The Innocent Quotes

“But what if you are a smart girl in love? All because I was a book nerd didn’t mean, I didn’t feel, I didn’t want. Shylock had cried out in excess of pain, “If you prick me do I not bleed!” But a book nerd is not allowed to be human, to say “you make me melt” and still have her mind want something else entirely?”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent: A Myth

“She came downstairs like a doe stepping into a clearing on the first day of hunting season. I felt like a coward. I was lower than dirt. I had used every trick in my book to get her to come downstairs. I had manipulated her emotions, cheated and wormed to beat her at this game we were playing. But then I saw her, and I was so happy. I knew I would have burned the building down for the sight of her running toward me out of the flames.”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent: A Myth

“When you fall in love, when Love really does its worst, it gives you no cause. It swallows you whole. It allows no refusals. Like Jonah only after he had been inside the whale awhile, you may say, if asked, “Oh, this is why I am here.”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent: A Myth

“When I was with him, I felt like a book worth reading all the way through again and again and again. Sure, he liked my cover. I wanted him to, but I wanted him to like everything else too. I imagined him buying the book, studying it, quoting it, memorizing his favorite parts. He’d keep it with him always, like a Bible, hold it sacred even when the cover fell off and the book became bent with age and use. Maybe, he’d be buried with it. That’s all I wanted.”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent: A Myth

“There's nothing worse than the day you find out that your parents are nasty, horny mortals like everyone else. It just kills your childhood.”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent: A Myth

“He stared at me in complete puzzlement, “And while I’m committing incest for you is there anything else you’d like? Maybe a side-order of bestiality?”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent: A Myth

“One night, we somehow ended up discussing Wile E. Coyote as a paradigm for obsession. She argued that Wile E., with all the resources he wasted on gadgets, could have been living high on the hog.
“He was so skinny,” she complained after she had Googled him and watched a few skits on YouTube. “Poor thing, he looks like a size-zero model.”
“But, Love, no other food would have satisfied him. He only wanted the Road Runner. He was obsessed with her. Obsession does not allow for satisfaction. You can never really eat your cake and have it too, which is the only way you can satisfy your obsession by devouring and yet having the object of your fascination,” I said from experience.
“But he really didn't want to catch it,” she argued.
“What do you mean?”
“It was the chase he wanted. To eat the Road Runner would have ended that, ended his only reason for living. He isn't really that inept. He really didn't want to catch it.”
“I guess not,” I said, thoughtfully. “It's the journey not the resolution that matters. If he caught her, he would lie down next to her and die too.”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent: A Myth

“I’m a virgin, okay?”
There was a moment of silence while I assume he was struggling to understand the connection. Then he spoke.
“I’m not prejudiced against anyone.”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent: A Myth

“To be a devil isn't so bad; to be a devil that can still see beauty, still remember what it was like to be in the sight of the most holy, now that was an obscenity, and that was what I was.”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent: A Myth

“Well, you know. Some people are like wolves and some are like bears. And bears and wolves don’t go together. You don’t see me trying to convince you to be a wolf? So, why are you trying to convince me to be a bear?”
I could hear him blinking on the other side of the line. “Can you translate that into English?”
“Wolves mate for life. Bears hit and run.”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent: A Myth

“Compulsion is attraction without reason.”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent

“Poetry came to my lips at the sight of her. I was inspired by her in so many ways.”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent

“You have to get her to trust you more than she trusts herself.”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent

“I can fairly say it was the first time in my new life that I really wished I wasn't supernatural: if I had been human the pain would have stopped because I would be dead. II can only describe it as what a person would feel if he somehow, by some terrible miracle, survived the fall off a skyscraper. It was the feeling of every single nerve, bone, sinew, and cell breaking and howling in agony at the same time. A person might have one second of conscious agony before he saw the white light, one brief insight into what the word “disintegrated” really meant. But I had to sit, blinking at her while this happened. I couldn't get up or down or scream or vomit the way a visibly injured person might. I sat there.”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent: A Myth

“There is nothing worse than the day you find out that your parents are nasty, horny mortals like everyone else. It just kills your childhood.”
― Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent: A Myth