“jenna preferred to think of alice that way - like an art project, colors swirling inside her, rather than of how sick she was. ”

“She was never going to get used to how much the Faeries seem to stare at her, as if dissecting her and examining the little pieces inside her like a science project.~Ever Fire: A Dark Faerie Tale #2”

“How sweet," Annabelle mumbled sickly her eyes closed. "Every woman dreams of being told that she's preferable to a dead cow.”

“He focused on the inspector, instead, though she didn't want him watching her. But Rhys liked the way she looked, particularly when her expression suggested that she'd prefer to have a gun aimed at his head rather than sit across from him in a private railcar.”

“She looked deep into the sphere and watched the colors swirl around. As she watched the whirling colors, she could feel herself being drawn into the hypnotic patterns inside the orb. Deeper and deeper into the patterns she fell, forgetting where she was and what she was here for.”

“Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world. ... the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as a threat to the very fabric of society. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy and the deviant, the decadents attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art.”