Alma Katsu > Quotes

“I’d always secretly believed that a love as fierce and true as mine would be rewarded in the end, and now I was being forced to accept the bitter truth.”
― Alma Katsu, The Taker

“I´ve always wanted him to love me the way I loved him. He did love me, I know he did. Just not the way I wanted him to.

"And it´s so different for a lot of people I´ve known. One partner doesn´t love the other enough to stop drinking, or gambling, or running around with other women. One is the giver and one is the taker. The giver wishes the taker would stop."

"But the taker never changes," Luke says, though he wonders if this is always the case.

"Sometimes the giver has to let go, but sometimes you don´t. You can´t. I couldn´t give up on Jonathan. I seemed to be able to forgive him anything.”
― Alma Katsu, The Taker

“We were arrogant and naive, thinking we knew what we felt then was love. Love can be a cheap emotion, lightly given, thought it didn´t seem so to me at the time. Looking back, I know we were only filling in the holes in our soles, the way the tide rushes sand to fill in the crevices of a rocky shore. We-or maybe it was just I-bandaged our needswith what we declared was love. But, eventually, the tide draws out what it has swept in.”
― Alma Katsu, The Taker

“A man´s desire is a powerful thing. It can reduce a strong man to nothing. When he sees a woman who fascinates him, he will give up everything for her.”
― Alma Katsu, The Taker

“She was telling me that I had a life of disappointment before me if I continued to love him as I did. A love that is too strong can turn poisonous and bring great unhappiness. And then, what is the remedy? Can you unlearn your heart's desire? Can you stop loving someone? Easier to drown yourself; easier to take the lover's leap.”
― Alma Katsu, The Taker

“I don’t believe in monsters,” Stanton said. “Only men who behave like them.”
― Alma Katsu, The Hunger

“Have you ever been in love with someone so badly that you’d do anything for them? That no matter what you want, you want their happiness more?”
― Alma Katsu, The Taker

“The true measure of a man is how he behaves when death is close.”
― Alma Katsu, The Taker

“There is not only one measure of beauty, Lanore. Everyone adores the red rose, and yet it is a common sort of beauty. You are like a golden rose, a rare bloom but no less lovely.”
― Alma Katsu, The Taker

“I've come to warn you, too. It's a dangerous game you're playing. There's a reason the rest of us maintain a distance from Adair, and we've learned our lesson the hard way. But now you've shown him love and that's given him the notion that he is deserving of such devotion. Did you ever think that perhaps the only thing that holds the devil in check is that he knows how despised he his? Even the devil longs for sympathy at times, but sympathy for the devil is fuel for the flame. Your love will embolden him--likely in a way that will bring you regret.”
― Alma Katsu, The Taker

“She was continually shocked by the fact that the others seemed to forget the obvious: that the mountains, like most beautiful things in this world, were deadly.”
― Alma Katsu, The Hunger

“Reed once thought that love was akin to passion, but he saw now that it was something different entirely; that it was, perhaps, a kind of faith.”
― Alma Katsu, The Hunger

“Onu sevmek de, sevmemek de umutsuzdu...
Bu da bir lanet değilse, başka nedir, bilmiyorum.”
― Alma Katsu, The Taker

“Hope, Tamsen realized, could be a very dangerous thing, especially when dealt to desperate hands.”
― Alma Katsu, The Hunger

“He'd observed over the centuries that what made people old was when they could no longer keep up with change. It's the beginning of the end, though few recognize it as such at the time.”
― Alma Katsu, The Reckoning

“Paranoia is itself a kind of contagion. Humans are predisposed to it. I have long held that it is a learned behavior from our primitive ancestors, a defense mechanism. Cautious humans stay alive longer than incautious ones.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“Perhaps one day you will understand that, flawed as I am, no man will love you as I do, and you will search your heart and find that you love me, too.”
― Alma Katsu, The Reckoning

“Women were always forced to smile. Tamsen had mastered it so well it sometimes frightened her.”
― Alma Katsu, The Hunger

“But like many truths, no one wanted to hear it.”
― Alma Katsu, The Hunger

“It was like being in love with the sun: brilliant and intoxicating to be near, but impossible to keep to oneself.”
― Alma Katsu

“Fear was a chained dog, startling and rough and always dangerously close, stretching its leash, baring fangs.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“Maybe it takes one demon to keep the others away.” He paused. His eyes glistened with tears now. “Lucifer had been an angel first. I always remembered that.”
― Alma Katsu, The Hunger

“Evil was invisible, and it was everywhere.”
― Alma Katsu, The Hunger

“Someone once told her that the stars were merely sewing pins, holding the black sky up so that it did not come down on the world and suffocate it.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“The world was fragile. One day, growth; the next day, kindling.”
― Alma Katsu, The Hunger

“The living are often anchors for the dead. The old newspaperman Stead’s words come back to him, how the dead want to lay down their troubles and escape to the next world, but it’s the living, unable to let go, who keep them here. Love and desperation like heavy chains lash them to the earth.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“Men hid behind religion to keep others from seeing how frightened they were, how inept.”
― Alma Katsu, The Reckoning

“While I'd been plagued by nightmares of Jonathan's unrest in the hereafter, it was only now that I'd seen Adair again—and seen him so changed—that I could admit, even to myself, that it was him I daydreamed of, who I longed for, who I ached for, physically. That was how I'd betrayed Luke—in my desire for Adair. It wasn't so uncommon, was it? Living with one man while your mind is on another? Being unable to stop thinking of this other man who, for one reason or another, was not the one sitting beside you. Thinking of the way his eyes lit up when he saw you, of his wicked smile and what it was like when he held you, how you responded to the touch of his hands. In solitary moments, you remembered the little intimacies, the feel of his skin against yours, the way he liked to be touched, the velvet nap of his member, the way he tasted. You thought of him even though you could never be with him. His absence nagged like an itch you could never scratch.”
― Alma Katsu, The Descent

“He hoped Christian decency would keep these men from lying to them outright, but he’d been disappointed by Christian goodness in the past.”
― Alma Katsu, The Hunger

“One is the giver and one is the taker. The giver wishes the taker would stop.”
― Alma Katsu, The Taker