"Who knows? Maybe they're right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it. But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose. We are even free to choose the wrong thing."
-from Requiem (Delirium #3) by Lauren Oliver
"How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust -- and also to make you feel so whole?"
-from Requiem (Delirium #3) by Lauren Oliver
"But even outside I feel claustrophobic. There's not place to go. There's no way to escape the crushing sense of loss, the endless exhaustion of time sawing away at the people and things that I've loved."
-from Requiem (Delirium #3) by Lauren Oliver
"This is not any kind of happiness that I imagined. It is not what I chose. But it's enough. It's more than enough."
-from Requiem (Delirium #3) by Lauren Oliver
"[He] sacrificed himself once so that I could live and be happy. Now he has done it again. I've been so stupid. And he is gone; there is no way for me to reach him and tell him I know and understand. There is no way for me to tell that I am still in love with him."
-from Requiem (Delirium #3) by Lauren Oliver
"He who jumps may fall, but he may also fly."
-from Requiem (Delirium #3) by Lauren Oliver
"Take down the walls. Otherwise you must live closely, in fear, building barricades against the unknown, saying prayers against the darkness, speaking verse of terror and tightness. Otherwise you may never know hell, but you will not find heaven, either. You will not know fresh air and flying. All of you, wherever you are: in your spiny cities or your one-bump towns. Find it, the hard stuff, the links of metal and chink, the fragments of stone filling your stomach. And pull, and pull, and pull."
-from Requiem (Delirium #3) by Lauren Oliver
"'One must always be careful of books,' said Tessa, 'and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.'"
-from Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1) by Cassandra Clare
"Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry."
-from Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1) by Cassandra Clare
"There's plenty of sense in nonsense sometimes, if you wish to look for it."
-from Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1) by Cassandra Clare
"'Are you laughing at me?' 'Not at you,' said Will, grinning, 'more because of you. I've never seen anyone get so excited over books before. You'd think they were diamonds.' 'Well, they are, aren't they? Isn't there anything you love like that?"
-from Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1) by Cassandra Clare
"Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?"
-from "The Higher Pantheism" by Lord Tennyson
"He didn't know what books meant to her, that they were symbols of truth and meaning."
-from Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1) by Cassandra Clare
"Sometimes ... our lives can change so fast that the change outpaces our minds and hearts. It's those times, I think, when our lives have altered but we still long for the time before everything was altered -- that is when we feel the greatest pain. I can tell you, though, from experience, you grow accustomed to it. You learn to live your new life, and you can't imagine, or even really remember, how things were before."
-from Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1) by Cassandra Clare
"Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy as cruel as the grave."
-Song of Soloman 8:6-7
The human heart has hidden treasures,
In secret kept, in silence sealed;
The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,
Whose charms were broken if revealed
-Charlotte Bronte's "Evening Solace"
"He's very broken ... Like a lovely vase that someone has smashed. Only luck and skill can put it back together the way it was before."
-from Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1) by Cassandra Clare
"It is always better to live the truth than to live a lie."
-from Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1) by Cassandra Clare
"When two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or bronze."
-from Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1) by Cassandra Clare
"I could not tell you if I loved you the first moment I saw you, or if it was the second or third or fourth. But I remember the first moment I looked at you walking toward me and realized that somehow the rest of the world seemed to vanish when I was with you."
-from Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1) by Cassandra Clare
"I suppose she means for me to learn to love him. But she's young yet. She has plenty of years to learn what true love is, or at the very least what it isn't."
-from Wither (The Chemical Garden #1) by Lauren de Stefano
"There are so many thoughts in my head. Ones I should avoid. Ones I should gravitate toward. All of them fluttering like orange blossom petals in the morning fog. I can no longer discern which thoughts are dangerous; all I know is that I'm sick of being stagnant. So, not knowing what else to do, I start walking."
-from Fever (The Chemical Garden #2) by Lauren de Stefano
"It's momentum ... You can't just stand there if you want something to fly. You have to run."
-from Fever (The Chemical Garden #2) by Lauren de Stefano
"Even things that aren't broken can be fixed. ... Everything can become something it's not."
-from Fever (The Chemical Garden #2) by Lauren de Stefano
"'There are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.' For some reason, I'm finding it difficult to meet his eyes. I nod at one of the lower shelves and say, 'Maybe it's because in your mind, you don't have to worry about building materials. So you're not as limited."
-from Fever (The Chemical Garden #2) by Lauren de Stefano
