Larissa Lai Quotes

When you own nothing, it's hard to believe you have anything to lose. ~ Larissa Lai

That night the Salt Fish Girl came back looking exhausted and dishevelled. A Malaysian girl who worked at her factory had been stricken with hysteria, had gone to the toilet and begun screaming and tearing at her hair. She had been working at the factory for nearly three years and was half blind and bored out of her wits with the tedious repetitiveness of the work. Her hysteria had provoked others, until half the women in the factory were screaming and howling and throwing themselves against the walls in sheer frustration with the dreariness of their toil and the damage it was exacting from their once young bodies and once bright faces. ~ Larissa Lai

We all know that joy and sorrow are entirely matters of fate and have nothing whatsoever to do with planning. ~ Larissa Lai

How easily we abandon those who have suffered the same persecutions as we have. How quickly we grow impatient with their inability to transcend the conditions of our lives. ~ Larissa Lai

It was then that stories of the dreaming disease began to circulate more widely. We heard from our customers of a girl who smelled of cooking oil, who remembered all the wars ever fought. She could recall and recount every death, every rape, every wound, every moment of suffering that had ever been inflicted by a member of her ancestral lineage. The only place she could find relief from this barrage of collective memory was in water. ~ Larissa Lai

This is what it's like to drown: You take a last look at the sky, a last breath, slowly. Air goes into your lungs and then you are under water. You let the air out molecule by molecule, realizing for the first time how precious it is, this thing that feels so much like nothing, neither liquid nor solid. Your eyes are open wide. The world goes cool and green and you keep falling. There are shapes in the darkness, fronds of river weed waving, dark indescribable things that float and then sink with you. You never knew you were so heavy. The density of your flesh has never been of such prime importance. The air leaks out of you in spite of your mightiest attempts to hold it. You need more but there is none. Leafy things flail. The water's coolness is no longer soothing. You gasp. Water rushes into your lungs and floods them. Your eyes stare wider. You thrash. You want more than anything to live, to be able to rise again, but you keep falling. The river is bottomless. It pushes you along in the direction of its current like an impatient auntie, but it won't let you to the surface. Your eyes are wide open, but slowly everything goes black. You begin to float beneath the surface. You are conscious of the coolness again, of how green everything is. You move with the water and through it. You have left your body far behind. The river has become a part of you. ~ Larissa Lai

So that's who you want me to be? The innocent, sweet, shy girl you say I was?" She stormed over to the bed and snatched up the robe again. "Because I can't be her. I can't be anything but me. I love you, but I won't change who I am for anyone." She tied the robe around her waist and spread her arms wide. "This is me. You either love me for who I am, or you find someone else to love. ~ Larissa Ione

At first the social worker may become too emotionally involved with his clients, so that when they fail he suffers, both because they are unhappy and because their failure is his failure, too. It's hard to spend his days confronting devastating problems that he cannot fix - the misery and helplessness rub off on him. It may seem to him that to feel happy or spend money on himself is to betray the people he knows who are still suffering; or it may seem that his own unhappiness is a sign of his devotion. Perhaps he becomes angry, blaming systems and society for what he cannot fix himself.

Gradually, he learns to be more detached. He realizes that he needs to be tough, and to develop a thick skin. But if he becomes too detached, he stops caring about his clients at all. Perhaps he withdraws into cynicism and self-defense, as he feels his ideals and his sense of potency wither. Longer-serving people in the office notice the waning of his enthusiasm, and welcome him to their gallows-humor fellowship. He retreats into apathy and jokes and drinks after work. But even with his fellow apathetics to keep him company, the situation is depressing, and he looks for a way out. ~ Larissa MacFarquhar

Giving up alcohol is an asceticism for the modern do-gooder, drinking being, like sex, a pleasure that humans have always indulged in, involving a loss of self-control, the renunciation of which marks the renouncer as different and separate from other people.

To drink, to get drunk, is to lower yourself on purpose for the sake of good fellowship. You abandon yourself, for a time, to life and fate. You allow yourself to become stupider and less distinct. Your boundaries become blurry: you open your self and feel connected to people around you. You throw off your moral scruples, and suspect it was only those scruples that prevented the feeling of connection before. You feel more empathy for your fellow, but at the same time, because you are drunk, you render yourself unable to help him; so, to drink is to say, I am a sinner, I have chosen not to help. ~ Larissa MacFarquhar

Everyone knows the ship could sink, unable to hold the piles of bodies that keep crawling on like raging ants from a disrupted nest. But no one is heartless enough to say stop because what if they had been stopped before their turn? ~ Thanhha Lai

For the survivors, the disaster of the Indy is their My Lai massacre or Watergate, a touchstone moment of historic disappointment: the navy put them in harm's way, hundreds of men died violently, and then the government refused to acknowledge its culpability.

What's amazing, however, is that these men, unlike contemporary generations who've been disappointed by bad government, are not bitter. Somehow, a majority brushed aside their feelings of rancor and went on to help build the booming postwar American economy of the fifties. ~ Doug Stanton

Funny how his two special abilities - taking and giving life - were so opposite, but only the "good" one came with pain. He supposed it made sense; life fucking hurt. ~ Larissa Ione

How much time do you have? On Earth, I mean.'
'I honestly don't know.'
His entire body went statue still. 'I don't want to lose you. I know that makes me sound like a pussy, but I don't. ~ Larissa Ione

He didn't give a shit what Sin did, who she "mated" with, or what she did with her assassin business. But this Lycus fucker was blackmailing her, and that just pissed him off. The sudden image of her naked, beneath a well-muscled body did'nt bother him at all. At. All. ~ Larissa Ione

I step back,
hating pity,
having learned
from Mother that
the pity giver
feels better,
never the pity receiver. ~ Thanhha Lai

Sorry, I happen to be into women, so Thanatos doesn't do it for me. But it's probably fair to say that if I were gay, I'd do him. ~ Larissa Ione

Somewhere overhead, an owl hooted, and a few minutes later, a wolf howled into the growing darkness. Reseph took comfort in the sounds, because they meant he wasn't alone. Sure, the owl might fly over and shit on him, and the wolf might eat him alive, but at least he'd have company for a little while. ~ Larissa Ione

If Castle Dracula screwed a hospital, this would be the bastard offspring. ~ Larissa Ione

Your face is a secret. Hiss, Hiss. ~ Larissa Szporluk

The moment you put something down on paper it forces you to organize and arrange these thoughts a little better. ~ Jimenez Lai

I've got a mind to turn you over my knee and spank the spoiled hell out of you ~ Larissa Ione

He'd always prided himself on being more civilized than his brothers, but so much for that; he was becoming aroused in a damned sewer. ~ Larissa Ione

Wraith rubbed his hands together in cheesy horror-movie glee. "Join us or die." He grinned. "I've always wanted to say that. ~ Larissa Ione

I'm giving you a free shot at my blood and you're playing hard to get? What kind of vampire are you?" When Wraith just stood there, Kynan rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on. My blood's eighty proof. You want it. You know you do. ~ Larissa Ione

Did you accomplish anything in your meeting with Kynan and Arik?"
Limos, looking proud of herself, bobbed her head excitedly. "I broke Arik's ribs."
Reaver exhaled on a deep sigh. "Anything else? ~ Larissa Ione

I saw sunrises fade and burn among fleets of sparks. The moon blossomed
like a lily carved of bone ...
The Death of the Astronaut, page 390. ~ Lewis Turco

Wraith snorted. "Cowards. Seriously. Who brings a gun to a knife fight? That's cheating."
"You don't have a gun?" Kynan asked.
Wraith made a face of digust. "It's not very sporting to shoot people."
"So you're saying that you didn't shoot the people who shot you?"
"Hell, yeah, I shot them. ~ Larissa Ione

I want you, Cat. I want you more than I've wanted anything since I fell. ~ Larissa Ione

You're no angel. You're Fallen. You just haven't had the decency to lose your wings. [Reaver] ~ Larissa Ione

Even though I knew I had a snowball's chance in Hades with you." She sniffed and wiped a tear with the back of her hand. "I just ... I just wanted to give you something pure. It's all I have. Had. Everything else about me is tainted by demon blood. But I had that. And it's always been yours."
-Gem to Kynan
Excerpt From: Larissa Ione. "Desire Unchained." iBooks. ~ Larissa Ione

Sort of. I can feel the arrangement of the virus or bacteria or whatever. And once I learn it, I can replicate that specific disease." She shot Conall a smirk. "Khileshi cockfire is a favorite."
Wraith laughed. Conall paled. Eidolon looked at her like she was responsible for every case of the excruciating, dick-shriveling venereal disease he'd ever treated. The guy was so freaking uptight he probably starched his freaking underwear. ~ Larissa Ione

The hardest - the part that's hard is to kill, but once you kill, that becomes easier, to kill the next person and the next one and the next one." -Varnado Simpson, Charlie Company of My Lai ~ Jonathan Glover

So,uh, where am I, exactly ? And what do you plan on doing with me ?"
"You're at Underworld General Hospital. As you can probably guess, we specialize in nonhuman medical care. Our location is secret, so don't ask."
"UGH ? Your hospital is called 'ugh' ? Oh, that's precious. ~ Larissa Ione

She rounded on him. "You wouldn't, you giant ass." To be honest, she didn't understand, either. But that didn't stop her from putting several days' worth of fear and stress on the table. "I'm scared, okay? I'm lost. I don't know where I am, and everyone here looks at me like they want to eat me or torture me. Maybe both. I want to go home, but then I don't want to go home because everything I thought I knew is one big lie. The people I trusted have turned against me, and even my own brother is afraid to help me." She paused to take a breath, fresh fuel for her tirade. "I should hate you, but instead, I'm attracted to you, which is beyond twisted, especially since I know that after I get Neriya back, I'm probably going to die." She dashed away tears with the back of her hand. "So forgive me if I'm a little emotionally unstable right now." She sniffed. "Ass. ~ Larissa Ione

Okay, listen. From what Shade said, Roag got toasted like a burnt marshmallow. He would have been nearly destroyed, right down to his junk." Wraith grinned. "Which is really fucking funny. ~ Larissa Ione

Criminy. Whatever. Just do something."
"Criminy?" Than stared. "Seriously? Big, bad, Mohawk-haired demon says 'criminy'?"
"Yes, criminy." Hades rubbed his bare chest. "And, fuck off. ~ Larissa Ione