Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, #2)

by Cassandra Clare

Memories did one no good, not when one knew the truth in the present.

“And doing nothing, I find, rarely accomplishes anything. Besides, what could go wrong?”

“‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave,’” said Jem. “Song of Solomon.”

“The idea of parabatai comes from an old tale, the story of Jonathan and David. ‘And it came to pass . . . that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. . . . Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul.’ They were two warriors, and their souls were knit together by Heaven, and out of that Jonathan Shadowhunter took the idea of parabatai, and encoded the ceremony into the Law.”

He had looked forward to an evening spent by the fire here—a glass of wine, a book, and being left strictly alone.

“What did they do? Nothing. It is me. I am poison. Poison to them. Poison to anyone who loves me.”

“No one can live with nothing,” he whispered.

“No one forgets about their family,” said Jessamine sharply.

“I feel myself diminished, parts of me spiraling away into the darkness, that which is good and honest and true—If you hold it away from yourself long enough, do you lose it entirely? If no one cares for you at all, do you even really exist?”

The darkness came and enveloped her, wrapping her in its cool silence.

I could become anything, anyone. She had never felt more mutable, more fluid, or more lost.

“I’m so tired, Tess,” he said. “I only wanted pleasant dreams for once.” “That is not the way to get them, Will,” she said softly. “You cannot buy or drug or dream your way out of pain.”

She wanted more of this feeling, she knew, more of this fire, but none of the novels she had read told her what happened now.

The virtue of angels is that they cannot deteriorate; their flaw is that they cannot improve. Man’s flaw is that he can deteriorate; and his virtue is that he can improve. —Hasidic saying

“I meant the essay about how no man is an island. Everything you do touches others. Yet you never think about it. You behave as if you live on some sort of—of Will island, and none of your actions can have any consequences. Yet they do.”

But all these were things he could not want, because they were things he could not have, and wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness.

It had been so long since he had searched for words that would earn him forgiveness and not hatred, so long since he had sought to present himself in anything but the worst light, that he wondered for a panicked moment if it were even something he was still able to do.

But no one should shoulder every burden alone.

“She has always been someone so full of wanting. She has always been so desperate.”

Her hunger to know what she was still burned inside her; if even her own features were no longer the ones she’d been born with, how could she justify this demand, this need to know her own nature?

The darkness returned, and Tessa fell into it, grateful for the respite from light and thought. She wrapped herself in it like a blanket and let herself float, like the icebergs off the coast of Labrador, cradled in the moonlight by icy black water.

Lies and secrets, Tessa, they are like a cancer in the soul. They eat away what is good and leave only destruction behind.”

“I’ve never minded it,” he went on. “Being lost, that is. I had always thought one could not be truly lost if one knew one’s own heart. But I fear I may be lost without knowing yours.”

<\\3

I have gambled and lost everything.

“My whole life wrecked, destroyed . . .”

“He’s very broken,” said Magnus. “Like a lovely vase that someone has smashed. Only luck and skill can put it back together the way it was before.”

“He has believed one thing for five years, and now he has realized that all this time he has been looking at the world through a faulty mechanism—that all the things he sacrificed in the name of what he thought was good and noble have been a waste, and that he has only hurt what he loved.”

“It is always better to live the truth than to live a lie. And that lie would have kept him alone forever. He may have had nearly nothing for five years, but now he can have everything. A boy who looks like that . . .”

For love is as strong as death.

She had never imagined she had the power to make someone else so happy. And not a magical power either—a purely human one.

Was this what it meant to love someone? That any burden was a burden shared, that they could give you comfort with a word or a touch?

It was books that kept me from taking my own life after I thought I could never love anyone, never be loved by anyone again. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them.