Top 500 Karen Marie Moning Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “I began peering into the corners of the room, making sure all the shadows were cast by objects and obeying known laws of physics.”

— Karen Marie Moning

402. “There’s only one question that matters, Ms. Lane, and it’s the one you never get around to asking. 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 has 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, Ms. Lane?”

— Karen Marie Moning

403. “Love doesn’t build cages. It builds stairways to the stars.”

— Karen Marie Moning

404. “Relax. Live. Keep your eyes open. See what comes.”

— Karen Marie Moning

405. “Drustan didn’t tell me either. He regretted that later, when I kissed Dageus because I thought he was Drustan. Drustan didn’t care for it one bit. They’re possessive about their women, but I’m sure you know that. I’m Gwen, by the way, Drustan’s wife.”

— Karen Marie Moning

406. “The most critical, defining battles we wage in life, we wage alone. Against ourselves.”

— Karen Marie Moning

407. “I love books, they’re in my blood.”

— Karen Marie Moning

408. “Nuns? They’d take one look at Barrons and decide the devil himself had come knockng. He not only looked dangerous, he emanated something that made even me feel like crossing myself sometimes, and I’m not religious.”

— Karen Marie Moning

409. “I hate it when people throw big sweeping generalizations at you that you can’t even begin to interpret.”

— Karen Marie Moning

410. “Attitude shapes reality.”

— Karen Marie Moning

411. “Life is a gift. You fight to keep it. You never quit. Never.”

— Karen Marie Moning

412. “You will most certainly scream. I promise you that.”

— Karen Marie Moning

413. “There are only shades of gray. Black and white are nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we try to judge things, and map out our place in the world in relevance to them. Good and evil, in their purest form, are as intangible and forever beyond our ability to hold in our hand as any Fae illusion. We can only aim at them, aspire to them, and hope not to get so lost in the shadows that we can no longer aim for the light.”

— Karen Marie Moning

414. “Lies roll off us. It’s the truths we work hardest to silence.”

— Karen Marie Moning

415. “The bottom line is we choose our epitaphs.”

— Karen Marie Moning

416. “I hate sentences that begin with my name followed by the claim – indubitably erroneous – that the speaker knows something about me. Those kinds of sentences rank right up there with the ones that begin with You know what your problem is? That’s always a doozy. Talk about a trick question. Nothing worth hearing ever follows that preface.”

— Karen Marie Moning

417. “Cease ceasing movement so abruptly! Christ, woman, must you catapult forward after each cessation? Are you certain you’ve strapped the mirror securely? We should stop and check it. By Danu, wench, try nudging this beast gently, not kicking it with both heels! A silence, a slew of choked curses, then: Horses! What the bloody hell is wrong with horses? Have they all been slain in battle?”

— Karen Marie Moning

418. “Yes, I have loved, Ms. Lane, and although it’s none of your business, I have lost. Many things.”

— Karen Marie Moning

419. “Those who were so long imprisoned in ice and darkness seem to find the sunlight jarring, painful. The longer I walk around with this grief inside me, the more I understand that. It’s as if sunshine is a slap in the face that says, Look, the world’s all bright and shiny! Too bad you’re not.”

— Karen Marie Moning

420. “Sometimes when really bad things happen, you put them in a box and never look at them again because they’ll cost you the rest of your life. Some wounds never heal. You excise the savaged flesh and become the next thing.”

— Karen Marie Moning

421. “Lists had become my anchors. They got me through the days. The oblivion of sleep got me through the nights.”

— Karen Marie Moning

422. “To one who stopped living a millennium ago, I say, “Show me how to live.”

— Karen Marie Moning

423. “I hate cages. For most folks, they’re built from fear and they do it to themselves. Not me. Mine were forged of helplessness. Most kids’ are.”

— Karen Marie Moning

424. “He was still frowning at the cake, looking at it as if he expected it to sprout dozens of legs and begin scuttling toward him, thin-lipped, teeth bared.”

— Karen Marie Moning

425. “Ignoring it makes it irrelevant. No man wants his nudity to be irrelevant.”

— Karen Marie Moning

426. “Solitude and inaction are unraveling me right down to the core.”

— Karen Marie Moning

427. “Oh, God, Drustan, she thought, you didn’t go back in time. You sent me back to save you!”

— Karen Marie Moning

428. “Keltar mates ne’er come easily to their men. Some travel distances too vast and strange to fathom, others travel but a short path, though a far distance in their hearts. Most resist every step of the way, yet for each Keltar, one woman will make that journey. ‘Tis up to the Keltar to claim her.”

— Karen Marie Moning

429. “I have studied humans for a small eternity. Intent infuses their every movement. Road maps to their inner navigation, plastered all over their skin. Born to be slaves.”

— Karen Marie Moning

430. “You tried to barter with the devil himself for me, you crazy woman. Bloody hell, doona you ever risk your life for mine. Ever! Do you hear me?”

— Karen Marie Moning

431. “I can either give in to fear and give up – or refuse to let it touch me and go on.”

— Karen Marie Moning

432. “Rioting begets violence begets rioting. I sometimes think the entire human race is comprised of barely restrained animals, avid for any excuse to tear off their masks of civility. And here I am, always trying desperately to keep mine on.”

— Karen Marie Moning

433. “Gah, some chicks should be shot. Put out of everyone else’s reproduction pool.”

— Karen Marie Moning

434. “Irony, perfect definition: that for which I want to possess it, I would no longer want once I possessed it.”

— Karen Marie Moning

435. “I looked from one to the other, and realized that Barrons and my dad were having one of those wordless conversations he and I have from time to time. Though the language was, by nature, foreign to me, I grew up in the Deep South where a man’s ego is roughly the size of his pickup truck, and women get an early and interesting education in the not-so-subtle roar of testosterone.”

— Karen Marie Moning

436. “I’m not helping you, Ms. Lane. I’m entertaining the notion that you might be of use to me. If so, I need you alive.”

— Karen Marie Moning

437. “Accept that you’re outgunned? Stay on the floor and don’t even try to fight? What kind of life is that?”

— Karen Marie Moning

438. “When you treated things badly, things behaved badly.”

— Karen Marie Moning

439. “You can discover just as much from what people don’t say to you, as what they do. It’s not enough to listen to their words. You have to mine their silences for buried ore. It’s often only in the lies we refuse to speak that any truth can be heard at all.”

— Karen Marie Moning

440. “Naught will be done to you that you doona wish done. Dageus MacKeltar.”

— Karen Marie Moning

441. “When Barrons looks at me like that, it rattles me. Lust, in those ancient, obsidian eyes, offers no trace of humanity. Doesn’t even bother trying. Savage Mac wants to invite it to come out and play. I think she’s nuts. Nuts, I tell you.”

— Karen Marie Moning

442. “Since I’ve been on my own, I’ve been eating a lot of popcorn, cereal, instant noodles, and snack bars. I have a hot plate in my bedroom, a microwave, and a small fridge. That’s the kind of kitchen I know how to get around in.”

— Karen Marie Moning

443. “Your race devotes itself to justifying its errors, not correcting them.”

— Karen Marie Moning

444. “Could words and symbols wield such power? Could mere scribblings on parchment unmake a person’s moral fiber? Weren’t we made of sterner stuff?”

— Karen Marie Moning

445. “Being threatened seems to being out the worst in me.”

— Karen Marie Moning

446. “Maybes are anchors you chain to your own feet. Right before you leap off the boat into the ocean.”

— Karen Marie Moning

447. “I contemplate the notion that maybe regrets are a process of accumulation of time, as unavoidable as a closet full of clothes and more bags of them in the attic. Is accumulated baggage what makes people get old? If so, they need to clean out their fecking attics, send the stuff to consignment shops and remember how to walk around naked like kids, little bellies sticking out, always ready for a good laugh.”

— Karen Marie Moning

448. “Strong enough that I was no longer afraid to be gentle. Powerful enough that I could be vulnerable. Scarred enough that I could understand and tread lightly around the deepest scars of others.”

— Karen Marie Moning

449. “You had no right.” “Ah, the morally outraged cry of the weak: You’re not ‘allowed’ to do that. One is allowed to do anything one can get away with. Only when you understand that will you know your place in this world. And your power. Might is right.”

— Karen Marie Moning

450. “Barrons knows virtually everything about me. I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere he has a little file that encompasses my entire life to date, with neatly mounted, acerbically captioned photos – see Mac sunbathe, see Mac paint her nails, see Mac almost die.”

— Karen Marie Moning