Screw up my life?" He stared at me for a second and then said, deadpan, "I'm a five-foot-three, thirty-seven-year-old, single, Jewish medical examiner who needs to pick up his lederhosen from the dry cleaners so that he can play in a one-man polka band at Oktoberfest tomorrow." He pushed up his glasses with his forefinger, folded his arms, and said, "Do your worst.

She studied my face for a long minute. "Are you going to help my mom?" It was a simple question. But how do you tell a child that things just aren't that simple, that some questions don't have simple answers--or any answer at all?

Murphy nodded, frowning at the road ahead of her. "The reason treachery is so reveiled," she said in a careful tone of voice, "is because it usually comes from someone you didn't think could possibly do such a thing.

There are bad things in the world. There's no getting away from that. But that doesn't mean nothing can be done about them. You can't abandon life just because it's scary, and just because sometimes you get hurt.

Magic comes from what is inside you. It is a part of you. You can't weave together a spell that you don't beleive in.

Demonreach only wants Harry to see what's going on." "Why doesn't it just marry him?" Thomas muttered under his breath. "It sort of did," I said. "My brother the... geosexual?

A bolt of warmth, fierce with joy and pride and gratitude, flashed through me like sudden lightning. I don't care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching-they are your family. And they were my heroes.