Tricks for Free

Your family, your real family, will always welcome you home with open arms. Anyone who says you can lose their love isn't really family, no matter what blood says.

Love is love. If anybody tells you that your love's not worth having, shoot them in the kneecaps a couple of times. It won't change their minds, but it'll make you feel better.

To people who think they're the best the world has to offer, kindness is an afterthought and an unnecessary one at that.

Turns out, ignorance often comes with an exciting, unexpected side effect: cruelty. To people who think they're the best the world has to offer, kindness is an afterthought and an unnecessary one at that.

It’s not that I hate my job. It’s that I hate the people I have to do it with.

You can't do this alone. Nobody can. Nobody should have to.

If you live a lie too long, it turns into the truth. Be careful which ones you decide deserve that kind of power.

Magic is nice, but napalm is reliable.

Being a cryptozoologist is like being a zoologist crossed with an anthropologist, and knowing that there’s always a chance your subjects will get offended and kick you out for something that seemed like it should have been perfectly innocuous. Nothing is perfectly innocuous once a multi-century genocide gets involved. Nor should it be.

That was all it took. I was formerly homeless, a pity hire, and there was no possible way I could ever be as deserving of comfort or compassion as they were, because poverty is always a personal failing, no matter how it came about.

I want my mommy,” she whispered. I understood the sentiment better than I’d ever thought I would as an adult. I wanted my own mommy so badly that it hurt.

We are Aeslin. We believe, and we endure. So be it.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend; the earworm of my grandmother is my weapon.

Humans believe what humans want to believe, and mostly what humans want to believe is that their dominion over the Earth will never be challenged.

Bullying isn’t tied to age. It’s tied to who a person is, and sadly, these people were more interested in being ugly assholes than they were in being decent human beings.

The thing to remember about allies is that they want you to be an ally right back. If you’re not a friend to your friends, you’re going to be an enemy eventually.

I was formerly homeless, a pity hire, and there was no possible way I could ever be as deserving of comfort or compassion as they were, because poverty is always a personal failing, no matter how it came about.

his lips tasted like bad coffee, diner pie, and terrible decisions,

You'll never find a harder, more dedicated, more loyal worker than someone who's already been passed over by somebody else.

all the tension he’d been trying to wash away was back, and it had brought some friends along, to make sure it didn’t get lonely.

Sam rubbed his forehead with his free hand and tried to figure out when his life had gone quite this far sideways.

My family shares my context. They know my education, my experiences, where the bone-deep bruises on my psyche are.

People who were trying to wreak retribution were almost always people I was allowed to punch, and I was really looking forward to that right about now.

Suddenly losing one of the basic concepts of the universe? Probably not a good thing.

the sun was riding low, casting everything in that shade of gold that hundreds of horror movies set in middle America have conditioned me to think of as the color of apocalypse.

I straightened, trying to shake off the feeling that time was broken, that something had somehow gone horribly wrong and caused everything to stretch out like taffy.

Everyone’s a blogger these days. Even the six-year-olds could be tiny public relations disasters in princess dresses and pigtails.

isn’t a blood relative, but she’s absolutely a member of the family, because family is more than blood.