Nenia Campbell, Armed and Dangerous

"Life doesn't come with an eraser. Experiences leave their mark, for better or for worse. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never been hurt."

"Life's a party. So smile and eat shit and pretend it's fucking caviar."

"You were a well-respected agent, Michael, a rags-to-riches fairytale ending. Until you became disgraced. Now it appears your own organization wishes to be rid of you. Why is this?”“My gun turned back into a pumpkin."

"You must be a blast on long car rides.”“Oh, I am. You haven't experienced fun until you try to fuck in the front seat of a Civic."

"We both want you dead. I'm bringing the friendship bracelets to the next meeting."

"I'm pretty sure those're my balls you've found,” I said to the man searching my pants. “You gonna count 'em out now? Because I'll save you the trouble. There's two."

"All right,” she said a little sarcastically. “I was going to assume you liked eating babies and sacrificing virgins, but I might as well ask, what do you do for fun?”“I languish in sin,” I replied in the same tone. “I take my babies rare, and my virgins over easy."

"I'm not going to force you into anything you don't want. But I'm also not going to take a vow of chastity and pine away for you, or whatever the hell it is that men do in romance novels these days. I have needs. I'd rather satisfy them with you, but if you don't want me I suppose I'll just have to find someone else. Might take me a while, but I'll make do. I always have before."

"No. I made that choice. I let all that anger and pain get twisted up in my thoughts for you.” He leaned in. “It fucking kills me. Every night. I relive what I did to you every night.” His forehead rested against mine. “Until you,” he said softly, “I never felt truly helpless."

"As if I'd had time to drug it in the two milliseconds she'd let me out of her sight."

"College had once been my greatest aspiration; it stood for everything my mother did not—intellectualism, feminism, freedom. But being kidnapped had given me plenty of time to think, and somewhere between all that fear and dread, I'd realized that was the wrong reason to go to college. That the potential for those things had been inside of me all along, only I'd never realized because I hadn't believed myself strong enough to break free without an intermediary."

"I'd seen entire constellations of possibility I'd never previously been aware of, so blinded had I been by the bright, glaring stars of expectation. Freedom, I was beginning to think, had less to do with where you were, and was more about who you were trying to be."

"He was everything your mother warned you about when she told you not to walk alone in the dark."