More Words That Speak to Your Soul

Powerful Quotes from The Fever Series: Dreamfever and Shadowfever

Most of the Wenches are knee-deep in rereading the Fever series, as we are wont to do when we are about a week out from the next release. Whenever I am rereading Fever I am always amazed at the depth and power of the words that KMM writes. The initial fantastical story sucks me in, the love story keeps me turning pages, but the depth of the ideas amazes me and touches my heart and soul in a way that few tales do.

I've shared with you many of the most powerful quotes from the first three books here. There wasn't room in one post to include all of KMM's wisdom, so here is part two. Alas, there is still not room to get all if it in this post, mostly because Shadowfever is an epic masterpiece, overflowing with brilliance. So click through to read the quotes from Dreamfever and Shadowfever that I carry with me, and look for a part three soon.

Dreamfever

I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows when the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it. For some people, that time never comes. Some stay fractured, forever broken. You see them on the street, pushing carts. You see them in the faces of the regulars at a bar.

   So what's the big picture about our lust for sex? We're not trying to acquire something. We want to feel something: Alive. Electrically, intensely, blazingly alive. Good. Bad. Pleasure. Pain. Bring it on--all of it.
For people who live small, I guess enough of that can be found in sex.
But for those of us who live large, the most alive we ever feel is when we're punching the air with a fist, uncurling our middle finger with a cool smile, and flipping Death the big old bird.

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.

"Good and evil are merely opposite sides of the same coin, Mac. Get tossed in the air enough, it's easy to come down on the wrong side."

Life didn't explode in the sunshine and pretty places. Life took the strongest root with a little bit of rain and whole lot of shit for fertilizer. Although love could grow in times of peace, it tempered in battle.

Alina and I had always intuited, with no small wry pique, that, although our parents adored us and would do anything for us, they loved each other more. As far as I was concerned, that was the way it should be. Kids grow up, move on, and find a love of their own. The empty nest shouldn't leave parents grieving. It should leave them ready and excited to get on with living their own adventure, which would, of course, include many visits to children and grandchildren.

"You want truths from me? See me when you look at me."

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

"People are capable of varying degrees of truth. The majority spend their entire lives fabricating an elaborate skein of lies, immersing themselves in the faith of bad faith, doing whatever it takes to feel safe. The person who truly lives had precious few moments of safety, learns to thrive in any kind of storm. It's the truth you can stare down stone-cold that makes you what you are. Weak or strong. Live or die. Prove yourself. How much truth can you take...?"

Shadowfever

Every time I think I'm getting wiser, more in control of my actions, I go slamming into a situation that makes me excruciatingly aware that all I've succeeded in doing is swapping one set of delusions for a more elaborate, attractive set of delusions--that's me, the Queen of Self-Deception.

Hope Strengthens, Fear Kills...
That simple adage is master of every situation, every choice. Each morning we wake up, we get to choose between hope and fear an apply one of those emotions to everything we do. Do we greet the things that come our way with joy? Or suspicion?
Hope strengthens...

It's funny the things people say when someone dies.
He's in a better place.
How do you know that?
Life goes on.
That's supposed to comfort me? I'm excruciatingly aware that life goes on. Ir hurts every damned second. How lovely to know it's going to continue like this. Thank you for reminding me.
Time heals.
No, it doesn't. At best, time is the great leveler, sweeping us all into coffins. We find ways to distract ourselves from the pain. Time is neither scalpel nor bandage. It is indifferent. Scar tissue isn't a good thing. It's merely the wound's other face.

Silence isn't golden, it's deadly. It's a vacuum that fills up with ghosts. 

Never underestimate a well-dressed bimbo.
The real thinkers of the world aren't the best dressed. Staying on top of the latest fashions, accessorizing, and presenting oneself is time consuming. It takes a lot of effort, energy, and concentration to be incessantly happy and perfectly groomed. You meet somebody like that--ask yourself what they're running from.

I understand now why Barrons was always insisting I stop asking him questions and judge him by his actions alone. It's so easy to lie. What's even worse is how we cling to those lies. We beg for the illusion so we don't have to face the truth, don't have to feel alone.

I wasn't prepared for death. Nobody is. You lose someone you love more than you love yourself, and you get a crash course in mortality. You lie awake night after night, wondering if you really believe in heaven and hell and finding all kinds of reasons to cling to faith, because you can't bear to believe they aren't out there somewhere, a few whispered words of a prayer away. 

The worst part about losing someone you love--besides the agony of never getting to see them again--are the things you never said. The unsaid stalks you, mocks you for thinking you had all the time in the world. None of us do.

Some people bring out the worst in you, others bring out the best, and then there are those remarkably rare, addictive ones who just bring out the most. Of everything.
They make you feel so alive that you'd follow them straight into hell, just to keep getting your fix. 

Fear is more than a wasted emotion. It's the penultimate set of blinders. If you can't face the truth of your reality, you can't be part of it, can't control it. You may as well throw in the towel and yield to the whims of anyone with a stronger will.

"Most people are good and occasionally do something the know is bad. Some people are bad and struggle every day to keep it under control. Others are corrupt to the core and don't give a damn, as long as they don't get caught. But evil is a completely different creature, Mac. Evil is bad that believes it's good."

" 'Like' is such puerile word. Mediocre people like things. The only question of any significant emotive content is: Can you live without it?"

"Dying is overrated. Human sentimentality has twisted it into the ultimate act of love. Biggest load of bullshit in the world. Dying for someone isn't the hard thing. The man the dies escapes. Plain and simple. Game over. End of pain. Alina was the lucky one. Try living for someone. Through it all--good bad, thick, thin, joy, suffering. That's the hard thing."

Daddy told me once that we believe others are capable of the worst we ourselves are capable of.

One thing I've learned is that the harder your life gets, the gentler you have to be with yourself when you finally get some downtime, or you can't be strong when you need to be.

"If only it could be turned off. It's not a faucet. Love's a bloody river with level-five rapids. Only a catastrophic act of nature or a dam has any chance of stopping it--and then usually only succeeds in diverting it. Both measures are extreme and change the terrain so much you end up wondering why you bothered. No landmarks to gauge your position when it's done. Only way to survive is to devise new ways to map out life."

"You choose what you can live with. And what you can't live without.

"Some actions change you for the better. Some for the worse. Be sure which one it is and accept it before you do anything."

"Some things are sacred. Until you act like they're not. Then you lose them."

Everywhere I looked, I could see only shades of gray. Black and white were nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we tried to judge and map out our place in the world in relevance to them. Good and evil, in their purest form, were as intangible and forever beyond our ability to hold in our hand as any Fae illusion. We could only aim at them, aspire to them, and hope not to get so lost in the shadows that we no longer see the light.

Come back, come back, you want to scream...just one more minute. Just one more smile...one more chance to do things right. But he's gone. He's gone. Where did he go? What happens to life when it leaves? Does it go somewhere or is it just fucking gone?

One day you do meet a man who kisses you and you can't breathe around it and you realize that you don't need air. Oxygen is trivial. Desire makes life happen. Makes it matter. Makes everything worth it. Desire is life. Hunger to see the next sunrise or sunset, to touch the one you love, to try again. 

Being afraid is debilitating. I'll take truth over fear of it any day.

There was pain, but there was also joy. It was in the tension between the two that life happened. Imperfect as it was, this world was real. Illusion was no substitute. I'd rather live a hard life of fact than a sweet life of lies.

The good guys and bad guys aren't as easy to tell apart as I used to think they were. You can't look at someone with your eyes and take their measure.
You have to look with the heart.