"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselssly into the past."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
— C.S. Lewis (The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader")

"Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably."
— C.S. Lewis

"There is no pretending," Jace said with absolute clarity. "I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there is life after that, I'll love you then."
— Cassandra Clare (City of Glass)

"If you were half as funny as you think you are, you'd be twice as funny as you are now."
— Cassandra Clare (City of Bones)

"I was thinking about the first time I ever saw you," he said, "and how after that I couldn't forget you. I wanted to, but I couldn't stop myself. I forced Hodge to let me be the one who came to find you and bring you back to the Institue. And even back then, in that stupid coffee shop, when I saw you sitting on that couch with Simon, even then that felt wrong to me-- I should have been the one sitting with you. The one who made you laugh like that. I couldn't get rid of that feeling. That it should have been me. And the more I knew you, the more I felt it--it had never been like that for me before. I'd always wanted a girl and then gotten to know her and not wanted her anymore, but with you the feeling just got stronger and stronger until that night when you showed up at Renwick's and I knew."
— Cassandra Clare (City of Glass)

"Sarcasm is the last refuge of the imaginatively bankrupt. "
— Cassandra Clare (City of Bones)

"Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number..."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)