But I am a great pretender, sometimes so good at it that I convince myself that what I pretend is what is truly real.

People do not take actions based on logic. We make choices based on emotion. Every one of us. Then we use what we call logic to justify our choices.

I'm a bloodletter, not a politician," Nyx said. "I just take off heads.

I can think of only two movies with women killers we’re meant to sympathize with, and both because they’d been sexually assaulted—Thelma and Louise and Monster. And to be honest, I don’t imagine anyone would call the women in these films heroes. The popular comic book mercenary Red Sonja is, perhaps, a proper hero, but is, once again, motivated by a sexual assault. Male heroes are heroic because of what’s been done to women in their lives, often—the dead child, the dead wife. Women heroes are also heroic for what’s been done to women … to them.
We build our heroes, too often, on terrible things done to women, instead of creating, simply, heroes who do things, who persevere in the face of overwhelming odds because it’s the right thing to do.

I was limited by stories that came before mine.
We are so often limited by our own expectations of stories, by the stories that came before, by the heroes who came before.… How is it we can bear to live with ourselves, as readers and storytellers, if we swallow those limitations without questioning them?

Asking men to cut away their “feminine” traits asks them to cut away half their humanity, just as asking women to suppress their “masculine” traits asks them to deny their full autonomy.
What makes us human is not one or the other—the fist or the open palm—it’s our ability to embrace both, and choose the appropriate action for the situation we’re in. Because to deny one half—to burn down the world or refuse to defend the world from those who would burn it—is to deny our humanity and become something less than human.