“...often referred to herself as a bitch. It was a way of insulting herself and asserting herself simultaneously. She acted like a bitch when she was threatened. It was the only effective self-defense she had learned. The more frightened ... felt, the harder she lashed out. It was her offense and her defense.  ...the bitch was also ... the poet. She was a very sensitively constructed sending and receiving mechanism, extremely vulnerable and extremely wary.”

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”

“I looked at her and she looked at me and we weren’t walking. We were just standing there, and her eyes were so interesting. Not in the usual way of being interesting, like the extremely blue or extremely big of flanked by obscenely long lashes or anything. What interested me about the Duke’s eyes was the complexity of the color- she always said they looked like the bottom of trash-can bins, a swirl of green and brown and yellow but she was underselling herself she always undersold herself. Christ it was hard to unthink”

“Look,” she said, making the conscious decision to wrench herself back before her frustrated wolf took control and she found herself feasting on male lips currently thin with anger, “it’s nothing personal. I’m generally a bitch.”

“She felt as she often did in class when she was nearly sure she had the right answer, but could not always make herself raise her hand.”

“Somehow she managed to survive and dig herself out and—“ “And somehow get back to the farm and swing an axe into Zalachenko’s skull,” Blomkvist finished for him. “She can be a moody bitch.”