Best 59 quotes of Angela Panayotopulos on MyQuotes

Actions have reactions, nonetheless. People rarely show up at Hell's doorstep clutching a map of bad intentions.

Autumn came early and lingered with its shroud of rainstorms and its wreath of dead leaves.

Beeswax, with its subtle undertones of smoke and honey. The smell of ink on wet paper, the sickly-sweet smell of decay. The sweat of clean bodies, the scent of burnt gloves. She loved the crackle of the fire and the clang of the tools. She loved the magic of sweat-streaked alchemists who blew down metal pipes and created bubbles within molten glass. She loved the flawless final chapter, the glistening undulations as smooth as ice.

But anger is the world’s worst—and arguably most contagious—plague. It might look ugly on the outside, but it eats you from the inside out. If you catch it—and you will—you must accept it. It stems from the fear: understand that. You must fight it, you must heal, and you must let it go. Anger, when dealt with, is en ember that eventually dies out if you give it enough space and understanding.

Dad?" she said. "Do you want some coffee?" he asked. "Are you okay?" She shook her head. No. "There are only so many hours you can sleep in a stranded vehicle." He glanced at the dashboard of her car, then at the untouched receipt--her receipt--sticking out of the machine a few feet away like a white tongue. "There's only so many times you can try to resurrect the dead. You can sit there all you want but you're not going anywhere. And, stuck as you are, you'll be forced to think about it, forced to wake up at some point, forced to depart or die here.

Do you remember bedtime as a child? I was terrified of the dark. I was terrified of the closed closet door that surely cracked open when I wasn't looking and spewed out ghouls and devils. I took care that no arms or legs protruded from the bed. I sometimes slept with the covers over my head. Sweltering, panting, barely breathing. Not even my hair exposed, lest a monster discover and devour me. I remember begging my father to check under the bed. I remember trying to explain how some monsters had invisibility cloaks. He would kiss my cheek and switch off the light. We stop looking under the bed once we realize that the monsters are inside us. It's funny how they transform. Suddenly they don't mind daylight. Suddenly they dress nicely, speak our language, and share our customs. They sit next to us on the metro and jog around our neighborhoods. They slip things into our drinks at parties and offer us jobs. Sometimes we spot them, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we even do the unthinkable: we invite them to our bed. As adults, we burn down the sanctuaries we created as children. Our inner child freaks out, but its screams are drowned by our moans as our monsters bring us to orgasm.

Emotions were beautiful like birds of paradise, seemingly fragile, surprisingly resilient, fleeting and lovely, with wings that could churn blood and claws that could rake souls.

Fear is a question, really. What are you afraid of, and why? There's a history to every horror. Fear is a training master whom you run from or you face. Defining your backstory is the prelude to the story. That's how you solve fear. You rewrite it.

Fireflies were like fairy tales. They appealed to the young, the old, and the imaginative. In a world of detestable insects, these bugs were the exception. They had an adorable way of flying so whimsically despite their butts being on fire.

He'd thought he'd outlived war. Ultimately, war outlived everyone.

Hell and Heaven are states of being, not destinations. They are worlds we carry within. Don't expect to find angels and demons -- not in the way you've envisioned them. As God is called Allah, so Man is called Monster. Don't be fooled by titles. Call a skunk a rose and it will continue to reek. Hydras do not crawl out from between the weatherworn pages of fairytale anthologies. On the contrary, they ride the subway and order food at the local drive-through and enjoy stolen kisses at the cinema. Only one head is visible to the naked eye. They tend to avoid reflective surfaces. Each head is a sin: each belch of fire is a sin put to action. But you should know that the shadows differ. There may be seven heads, or three, or one. Those with one head are particularly tricky. Who's to say if they're human or hydra? You'd have to kiss them, bite them. You would know them by their mouth. The name of their sin is tattooed on the inside of their bottom lip, so they can lick and taste its sweetness.

He slipped off her clothes and covered her eyes with one hand, a blindfold of naivete she wore willingly, relishing his embrace like an idiot inmate who mistakes a straitjacket for a snuggie.

He was not her sole companion. She had her demons, too. You can't run from them, as Lexi discovered. Changing cities doesn't help either; you carry them along inside you. You just wake up one day, fed up, and decide to snuggle with them instead. You invite them along as you go about your day, balancing them on your shoulder as you would a toddler, but with very strict conditions: You will not set fire to my hair. You will not take candy from strangers. You will not tie me up in chains while I sleep. You will behave. And Lexi's demons, allowed to come close, sat on her shoulder. They waved to the angels perched on her other shoulder and struck up a conversation with Lexi. 'What's that noise?' her demons asked, sidling close to her ear. 'Oh, that?' Lexi massaged her temples. 'It's the air whistling through the hole in my heart.' 'You're afraid,' they taunted. 'I am,' she admitted. 'Afraid of the sky falling. Afraid of the tight-rope snapping. Afraid I can't dance well enough on the edge. Afraid there are no hands to steady my body. Afraid of hands that wish to cage my heart.' 'Coward,' the demons goaded.

He wasn't the sort of person you interacted with and fluttered away from; he was the type of man you fell for. People got hurt when they got attached to other people, because people always left or were taken away. Falling in love, therefore, was just a set-up for inevitable failure. She knew all this. But logic is fallacy when it spars with instinct. So she fell anyway.

His chuckles rumbled, devoid of humor, as if mirth was a kidney stone that had gotten stuck somewhere in the intestinal mess of the phone lines.

It's a long story." Zach cupped his hands around his mug. He raised it to his lips, wincing as the liquid burned his tongue. His smile reached his eyes. "That's my favorite kind," he said.

It was a fleeting feeling, one there and suddenly gone, like a dove shattered to pieces during a magician's disappearing act.

It wasn't the darkness that killed people. It was the people who carried the darkness within them that did.

Lexi was older now than she'd been in kindergarten. Her brain functioned with more logic and less emotion. Gabriel knew it would be harder this time. Now Lexi had to make sense of things before she believed in them.

Little boys can be very silly," Anastasia agreed. Her quiet hand stroked Lexi's head, untangling her hair. "But you know what, agapi mou? You shouldn't be scared. I think he's more afraid of you than you are of him." Lexi could feel her mother smiling. She liked her mother's smile. It took up her entire face, radiating from her lips to her dimples to the crinkles around her eyes. "He's new here, and I think he is a very lonely little boy. Do you know why he is mean? He doesn't know how to be nice.

Love. It was the only explanation. That was what love did to you. It wormed its way inside you and leeched you of your courage. It made you weak, reliant on other people's opinions and expectations. It paralyzed you.

Most people feared the darkness. Some people feared, more wisely, the things within the darkness. Gabriel feared both, and with good reason. He walked anyway. That had always been his way. He had a complicated history with the woodlands of the world. He'd met his share of the Cyclops and the Circes that lurked within. And the world never seemed to run out of monsters.

No one begins a war believing it'll follow them home.

No one had fought back. His friends had not retaliated and morphed into monsters. They had fallen like flies. Perhaps such evil did not lurk in the others. Perhaps he's been wrong. The thought came to him suddenly, stopping his heart as if he'd been yanked from the dance hall and flung countries and time-zones away only to crash into arctic waters. It marked the end of something, as revelations often do. He was the monsters.

Once upon a time, the world was quintessentially human. People took pride in normalcy; they preferred things in black and white, for salt and pepper are easier to digest than gray matter. When things were disagreeable or different, they liked to label them "otherworldly." It relieved them of accountability. "The Devil made me do it," they preferred to say. But when they looked in the mirror, they didn't notice the Devil looking back. Not at first.

One-winged angels, she thought. Perhaps that is what love makes us. To fly, we have to embrace each other.

Pappou did not look at Lexi. He scratched his nose and swung his komboloi in one hand so that the worry beads clacked against each other like tiny firecrackers, as if he hoped the clicking of them would snap the world back to its senses, knowing also that they couldn't.

Peace, so Miss Sanders could grapple with her demons. Quiet, so she could almost hear the Hellfire crackling beneath the crust of the carpeted schoolroom.

Rage swallowed remorse. Rage drop-kicked self-pity. Rage murdered sorrow. And then, like blood-red wine tucked into the refrigerator, rage chilled to become cold, calculating anger. Anger was a creature that arrived on her doorstep with a suitcase full of strategy and vengeance. It tipped its hat at her and hopped into her brain. It knocked on the Logic Department's door. It found a broken mirror somewhere in the crevices between her hippocampus and her hypothalamus, and it was wondering if somebody had misplaced it. No retaliation? It scoffed. Think again, missy.

She bit her lip, forcing the truth deeper inside until it caved her. She hunched over like a woman protecting her illegitimate unborn child. She brandished forks and knives and set them on the table, each fork crossed over each knife like a coat of arms, a pattern of X's.

She found a second blanket in the closet and curled up on the bed, feeling like the discarded toy of a spoiled child. She found a strange sort of comfort in the heat of her misery as the cold chilled her tears. In time, she would look up words like 'doormat' and 'wimp,' with Merriam-Webster definitions that would expose her to the faulty clockwork of her heart.

She raised her middle finger to their smiles. She downed vodkas and cocktails and stumbled through the crowds and the streets, occasionally stretching up to touch a star in the black ice cap of the sky, shaking her hand and blowing on her fingers when it burnt her.

She spared a glance for the townscape of jagged roofs and straggly tree branches, of rough edges that snagged the sky and made it bleed starlight.

She turned to face the door, knowing what she would find instead. "What big eyes you have," she whispered. "The better to see through your lies," he said. "What large hands you have..." "The better to strangle you with, my dear..." "What sharp teeth you have..." "The better to drink your blood with," he said with a laugh. "Is that what you expect me to say? I know this story better than you do. The wolf wins in my version." She thought of the black wolf she once knew in another life, a black wolf that never willingly left her side. "The wolf wins in mine, too.

She was lucky enough to know little enough to fear nothing more than wasps, the dark, and the darker figments of her imagination.

Something new prowled these floors, something that sucked the space into its lungs and pressed up against people's eyeballs. She felt the darkness and told herself she could walk away from it, forgetting how difficult it is to run from that which you cannot see coming.

That was what the agencies wanted: to mask everyone, to blindfold and brainwash them until habit became the new truth. Yes, rebels suffered. They were abused, wounded, locked up, and killed. Their families were broken apart like shattered clocks that could no longer tell time. History had a way of finger-painting every revolution with blood. Yet to what end would blind obedience lead? What was the purpose of blinding them all? Lexi's hand reached up and stroked Dominic's face. Beneath his scruff, above the webbing of nerves and veins, she thought for a moment that her fingers brushed against a string. "You put it on and take it off, my love," she whispered. "Until one day that mask might not come off. What then?" He shoved her away and switched off the light.

The air of the islands, she believed, was different than the air of other regions of the world. It engulfed her now, carrying with it flavors of sun-drenched soil and foam-flecked sea, aromas of virgin woods and naked rocks, its tang of citrus trees and its fizz of foreign wine-misted lips. It carried in its pockets the sounds of children's laughter, the clatter of drunken brawls, the mandolin music thrumming sensually from decades-old cassette tapes in the colorful souvenir shops where old ladies and young women waved at passersby. It came from near and far, rebounding off the blue-white flag strapped to ferry masts rearing above the sparkling waters, glinting in the brown-eyed winks and twirled mustaches of the locals.

The best conversations happen in the dead of night. So always choose the night shift. It might shorten your life, but you meet the most wonderful people.

The black snow on her friend's face stole him from her in fragments, trying to spirit him away.

The bus rumbled away, its gleaming yellow body disappearing around a bend in the road, consumed by veiny crimson leaves that shrouded the trees like sweaters threaded with blood

The butterflies were performing circus tricks now, flying through hoops of fire. Lexi had read about infatuation once. Some writer had doused the romantic notion of winged insects. He'd said the funny feeling was simply the motion of common sense fleeing the body. It made more sense, in a world where few things did. Lexi smiled, reveling in the feeling.

The chill of the glass and the crackle of the fire were languages she could fathom and echo.

The heat didn't bother her. She knew that Hell manifested itself in different ways.

The metal door began to roll open as she held her breath. Its parts creaked like the bones of a giant roused from his slumber, like a Lazarus that had hidden his flaming heart within fireproof walls, patiently sleeping as the comatose do. The smell hit her first. Mold. Dampness. Cold lifeless things. Within, there was a darker sort of silence, as if the building had been holding its breath for so long it had forgotten how to breathe.

The pink elephant barged into the room and trumpeted so loud she thought the ceiling might collapse. Memories erupted from its trunk. She snatched them up helplessly, holding them up to the light, studying their colors and pixels of pain.

There were many things she could have said, but we forget to forge armor against the knife-thrusts of our loved ones.

The road swerved left. The crash of waves morphed into the rumble of thunder, and the black asphalt tapered to become a slender stretch of rope. She followed it up into the darkness, night spilling around and below her as someone knocked over the ink-jar of the sky and scattered its liquid to the furthest corners, dislodging silver shards of moon that bounced off her umbrella.

The sandpaper of Greg's laugh fascinated Lexi as much as it frightened her. It was why she always thought of him as the Sandman, an interpretation not as sinister as E. T. A. Hoffman's but one that seemed to match, suddenly, in its role as a harbinger of death. Greg's voice rebounded around the building, dry and abrasive. Mirthless laughter is one of mankind's trademark noises. It's been used to mask pain for centuries.

The vehicle screeched away. A pair of black tire-tracks scorched the asphalt in its wake, as if the ground had sprouted its own set of horns.