The Saucy Wenches Book Club

I was going to eat him alive. I slid a hand up to his chest to pin him down, but he gripped my wrist. “When you lick me,” he said roughly, “I want to be alone—far away from everyone.... “And when I lick you,” he said, sliding his arms around me and tucking me in tight to him, “I want you splayed out on a table like my own personal feast.... “I’ve had a long, long time to think about how and where I want you ... I have no intention of doing it all in one night. Or in a room where I can’t even fuck you against the wall.” ~ Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

It smelled like adventure itself had been harvested in the wild, distilled to a fine wine, and splashed across each page. ~ Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Dammit, R.E.M. was right: Every single person on the planet had to take turns hurting. Sometimes all you could do was hold on to each other right until the dark spat you back out. Beach Read , Emily Henry

The world is filled with so many extraordinary wonders, isn’t it? You could spend a lifetime peering in forests and jungles and never see one tenth of nature’s secrets. ~ Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic

Young Ian and Rollo, Outlander, Starz “That dog is a wolf, is he not?” “Aye, well, mostly.” A small flash of hazel told him not to quibble. “And yet he is thy boon companion, a creature of rare courage and affection, and altogether a worthy being?” “Oh, aye,” he said with more confidence. “He is.” She gave him an even look. “Thee is a wolf, too, and I know it. But thee is my wolf, and best thee know that.” ~ Diana Gabaldon, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood

“If you’re lucky, people will love you in the way they know how. And if you’re really lucky, the love they can give will be the love you need.” “What if it isn’t?” “Then I guess you’ll have to settle for just being lucky.” ~ Tommy Butler, Before You Go: A Novel

“You’ve missed your calling.” “I’m a complete failure as a poet,” he said. “When I was fourteen, I wrote a long ballad about the bleakness of my life and the heaviness of the burden that was being me. My brother stole it and read it out loud at a family gathering. That was the first and the last time I managed to make the entire family laugh.” Steel’s Edge , Ilona Andrews

He believed that men, when confronted with a vast plenitude of anything, feel an irresistible urge to take it all, then to smash and destroy what they cannot use. ~ Annie Proulx, Barkskins

“Blow jobs are for major holidays. What you’ve got on your hands is a good old-fashioned foot job quid pro quo.” ~ Emily Henry, Beach Read

“Tell them to walk in the shade. To listen with their eyes, to see with their skin, and to feel with their ears, because life speaks to us all and we just need to know and wait to listen to it, see it, feel it.” ~ Sofía Segovia, The Murmur of Bees

“To the people who look at the stars and wish, Rhys.” ... Rhys clinked his glass against mine. “To the stars who listen—and the dreams that are answered.” ~ Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

The sky is scrubbed fresh and stark blue by the gone rain, but every trace of that water has evaporated from the earth around them. It feels like a dream, all that rainfall. “This is a cycle,” she thinks. Every day a fresh horror, and when it’s over, this feeling of surreal detachment. A disbelief, almost, in what they just endured. The mind is magical. Human beings are magical. ~ Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt

“With all due respect to poetic concision, the male of the species was endowed with a pair when a single might have sufficed.” ~ Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Worlds, like houses, have very particular smells, so subtle and complex and varied you barely notice them, and the smell of the Written filtered through the pine boughs like a delicate fog. Sun, sea, the dust of crumbling book spines, the salt and spice of a thousand trade ships. Home. ~ Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“The End begins before you are ever aware of it. It passes as ordinary.” ~ Ling Ma, Severance

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” ~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum