When Tana was six, vampires were Muppets, endlessly counting, or cartoon villains in black cloaks with red polyester lining.

Death has his favorites, like anyone. Those who are beloved of Death will not die.

We all wind up drawn to what we're afraid of, drawn to try to find a way to make ourselves safe from a thing by crawling inside of it, by loving it, by becoming it.

Maybe it was that nearly everyone else was dead and she felt a little bit dead too, but she figured that even a vampire deserved to be saved. Maybe she ought to leave him, but she wasn't going to.

Keep going' she told herself, 'Don't look back.' But she looked anyways.

Even from the beginning, that was the problem. People liked pretty things. People even liked pretty things that wanted to kill and eat them.

She took a deep breath, "Last chance. Are you in need of rescuing?" His expression turned very strange, almost as if she'd struck him, "Yes, " he said finally.

I will guard you from Death, for I have no fear of him.

People are fragile. They die of mistakes, of overdoses, of sickness. But mostly they die of Death.

They wore their strange beauty like war paint.

Nothing can happen more beautiful than death - Walt Whitman

Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence.

I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.

Sorrows, as storms, bring down the clouds close to the earth; sorrows bring heaven down close; and they are instruments of cleansing and purifying.

There's no need to wait for the bad things and bullshit to be over. Change now. Love now. Live now. Don't wait for people to give you permission to live, because they won't.

An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone.

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

It was when I entered the military preparatory school and put on its uniform, that a feeling of strength came to me, as if I had become master of my own destiny.

Do you think God gets stoned? I think so ... look at the platypus.

Our survival as a human community may depend as much upon our nurture of love in infancy and childhood as upon the protection of our society from external threats.

But our hearts are more elastic than we think, and the work of forgiveness and transformation and growth can do things you can't even imagine from where you're standing now.