“Haven't you ever known someone rejected by a lover, who, consumed by rage and jealousy, never lets go? They look on from a distance, unseen but boiling inside. The emotion never seems to tire, this hatred mixed with intense obsession, even with a kind of twisted love.”
“It's amazing how quickly nature consumes human places after we turn our backs on them. Life is a hungry thing.”
“Are you saying that your fat-ass cat has turned me into a vampire?
Um, maybe?”
“As a bio major, I figured "free will" meant chemicals in your brain telling you what to do, the molecules bouncing around in a way that felt like choosing but was actually the dance of little gears--neurons and hormones bubbling up into decisions like clockwork. You don't use your body; it uses you.”
“People only worry about the uncanny for about a week; that's the end of their attention span. After that, suspicions turn into shtick.”
“Probably? So you're asking me to trust my life to steel wool and peanut butter?"
"Poisoned peanut butter."
"Cal, I don't care if it's nuclear peanut butter.”
“so pRetty i hAd to Eat hiM”
“Dude, I just watched you climb up a f*cking building!-Lace”
“You know,' I called, 'you're the one that's going to have to explain to Max how you got your blender back.'
I'll tell him I astral-projected. Butt-head.”
“He chuckled, shaking his head. "Man, you hunters. I break a pencil and there's hell to pay."
"I can see how that's deeply unfair, Chip. Especially if that pencil should try to kill you with it teeth and claws, or launch its brood of a thousand deadly paper clips against you.”
“God, you mean I lost my virginity to the apocalypse?"
Morgan sighed again. "The whole thing was really embarrassing; my parents sent me to Brooklyn when they found out." She shrugged. "I thought I’d be safe in a gay bar, okay? What were you doing in there anyway?"
Lace looked at me sidelong. "You were where?"
I took a sip of beer, swallowed it. "I, uh, hadn’t been in the city...very long. I didn’t know.”
“A rat called Possible New Strain was sitting under a spaghetti strainer held down with a pile of journalism textbooks, saying rude things in rat-speak.”
“God, you mean I lost my virginity to the apocalypse?!”
“I'm not the one going for a biology degree. I'm just a philosophy major who eats people.”
“Maybe the natural world wasn't so jaw-droppingly horrible, appaling, nasty, vile. Sometimes nature could be quite sweet, really, as delicate as a confused and horny butterfly.”
“Lace: "Are you saying that your fat-ass cat has turned me into a vampire?"
Cal: "Um, maybe?”
“The Shrink always warned me that carriers stay wracked with lifelong guilt. It's not an uplifting thing having turned lovers into monsters. We feel bad that we haven't turned into monsters ourselves--survivor's guilt, that's called. And we feel a bit stupid that we didn't notice our own symptoms earlier. I mean, I'd been sort of wondering why the Atkins diet was giving me night vision. But that hadn't seemed like something to worry about...”
“peeps cant turn into anything smaller than what they are. where would the extra mass go”
“NO, WE DO NOT HAVE PENS!
Bring your own. You'll need them. You see, like every other department in the city, Records runs on Almighty Forms. There are forms that tell the Night Mayor's office what we hunters are doing - starting an investigation, ending one, or reaching various points along the way. There are forms that make things happen, from installing rat traps to getting lab work done. There are forms with which to requisition peep-hunting equipment, from tiger cages to Tasers. (The form for commandeering a genuine NYC garbage truck may be thirty-four pages long, but one day I will think of some reason to fill it out, I swear to you.) There are even forms that activate other forms or switch them off, that cause other forms to mutate, thus bringing newly formed forms into the world. Put together, all these forms are the vast spiral of information that defines us, guides our growth, and makes sure our future looks like our past - they are the DNA of the Night Watch.”
“It is always tempting to wonder what would have happened if … or if not. Usually it is a futile exercise, for what might have been is the greatest of all the mysteries.”
“The young are right to be fearless, she reminded herself. Remember yourself at that age.”
“I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one's wife's lover in one's socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.”
“If you think of someone's good qualities as the umeboshi in an onigiri it's as if their qualities are stuck to their back! Maybe the reason people get jealous of each other is because they can see so clearly the umeboshi on other people's backs.”
“For example, she did not mind at all if Christendom should be done for, stove in, kaput, screwed up once and all. She did not mind that the Christers were like everybody else, if not worse.”
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