Escape Quotes

“Young girls chased after bad boys for the same reason that riders broke wild horses; they wanted the rush of taming something, of bringing that raw energy to heel.”
― Nenia Campbell, Escape

“She had killed and she had liked it, and he surely would have delighted to see her as she was now. Half-mad and fading fast, every inch the Gothic heroine that he’d envisioned. Ophelia, floating dead in the water and haunted by ghosts. Lilith, crafted from the earth instead of as a subjugate of the flesh, drawn to the fiercely blazing beauty of an angel only to find that the brilliant light singed as cruelly as the fires of hell. A fallen woman, drawn to her Lucifer. A cautionary tale to those who refused to bend to the natural order and fell in love with the wrong kind of man.”
― Nenia Campbell, Escape

“She wasn’t soft or pretty; she was hard-edged and cold, like one of those cold bronze statues surrounded by high fences and crowned in razor wire. Don’t touch me, such defenses said, but it wasn’t enough to halt a breach, no. She had thought people only picked the soft-petaled, sweet-smelling flowers, but some people took thorns as a challenge.”
― Nenia Campbell, Escape

“She let out the breath she knew full well she’d been holding.”
― Nenia Campbell, Escape

“Some plants were pyrophytic and only germinated when ravaged by fire. Gavin had scorched her with the savagery of his cruel passions until she had been conditioned to bloom in the flames.”
― Nenia Campbell, Escape

“There were many stories of girls—brave girls, foolish girls, reckless girls, pretty girls—who went into the woods searching for fortune or adventure, only to encounter a monster. Whether man or beast, the monster served as an allegory for all the things that could befall a girl who strayed from the path. If she were valorous and her heart was pure, the stories said, she could rise above being brought low by hubris.

But the stories never talked about the other girls—the ones who never came out of the woods and found themselves an unwilling bride to the venal darkness within those trees. The girls whose virtue was not quite enough to resist the seasoned allure of the wicked villain and who, as a result, found that men, like beasts, could devour the unwary, and that it could feel so good to be consumed.”
― Nenia Campbell, Escape

“Identities were like teeth: hard to maintain and easy to lose, but people tended to look at you funny when you were missing one.”
― Nenia Campbell, Escape

“Gavin had thought tragedy suited her: a young Miss Havisham, wearing the moth-eaten tatters of her frayed hopes like a ravaged bride. She had thought at first that it was the chase he craved, or the thrill of conquest, but while both of those might have been true, it was her humiliation that got him off. Physical, psychological, sexual—his favorite games were the ones he played with her head.”
― Nenia Campbell, Escape

“When your whole foundation fractured well past the point of repair, all you could do was glue the pathetic, jagged shards of your life back together and try not to bleed on them.”
― Nenia Campbell, Escape

“She shattered through her horror as if it were a mirror and her sanity were the glinting fragments of broken glass.”
― Nenia Campbell, Escape

“She had tried to lock her sins up in the attic of her psyche as if they were a mystical portrait forced to bear the demonic scars upon her soul. But her actions had caught up to her at last, coming for their pound of flesh, and she could feel the burn of her transgressions on her skin like a half-healed tattoo.”
― Nenia Campbell, Escape

“I wanted you the moment I saw you run. You're everything I want. Not a rose, but a desert flower, enduring scorching heat to flower in darkness with a rare and singular beauty. My night-blooming cereus, bristling with spines.”
― Nenia Campbell, Escape

“There were things one could do, things so terrible, Val was certain they could make someone stop loving you. She was equally certain that she had done some of these things, and as desperate as she was to be proven otherwise, she was equally afraid that she was right. That she had become as awful as the rest of the world seemed to think she was. That she was unlovable.”
― Nenia Campbell, Escape