Readergirl ’s Reviews > These Violent Delights > Status Update

"It was a relief and a horror to be known so
perfectly."

"All he could think about was throwing himself against a wall,
over and over, until he’d smashed himself into shards so fine that the void
inside him could finally slip free."

“Nothing I do is ever going to matter.” The longer he spoke, the lighter
he felt. “Everything I do is so small and so useless. I’m not like you. I don’t
even have a shape of my own to hold anything else in place. The world
would be exactly the same without me—if I disappeared you’d be the same,
as if I’d never been here at all. I’ll never matter the way you do, and you
know it. You don’t need me.”

"There was something unsettling in the way the golden
autumn light moved over his cheekbones, a beauty so fleeting and elusive
that Paul knew he wouldn’t be able to hold it in his memory. "

"Once he knew the shape of someone else’s pain,
he could break off a piece of it—claim it as his own, keep it as a memento
under glass—and know they would be grateful to him for taking it away."

“Hard to trust you if you’re going to maim me,”- Paul

“Don’t be boring.”- Julian

He would have done anything, anything at all, if it meant Julian would
look at him this way a moment longer. The green of his eyes, like white
winter light vectored through the crest of a wave; the ravenous grasping for
evidence that Paul loved him, and the relief and terror at finding it.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Pablo. You’re just so sincerely
creepy.”- Julian

He had all but pleaded for it, the precision and scalpel-sharp intimacy of
Julian’s cruelty. He had needed to remember that they were monstrous
together, merciless, twins conjoined at the teeth.