Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3)

by Maggie Stiefvater

It wasn’t that the two of them had been fighting. It was that they’d been … not fighting. Not talking. Not anything. Gansey had kept going on the same road he always had, and Adam had taken a fork onto a second road.

It was just that spending time with Gansey and the others had made her think that the impossible might be more possible than she’d thought before.

The stars moved slowly above her, an array of possibilities, and for the first time in a long time, she felt them mirrored in her heart.

“He is a spider clinging in a web. Every leg touches a thread, and if anything happens to the spider, hell rains down.” Ronan said, “I already lived through hell.”

Now his snarl was back, which meant he was hurting.

Violence was a disease Gansey didn’t think he could catch. But all around him, his friends were slowly infected.

the knowledge that her mouth had been the last thing to touch the spoon.

“Everyone says, Just find Glendower,” Gansey said suddenly, “but all around me the cave walls are crumbling.”

“Everything has gotten so ugly. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

His noble and oblivious and optimistic friend was slowly opening his eyes and seeing the world for what it was, and it was filthy, and violent, and profane, and unfair. Adam had always thought that was what he wanted — for Gansey to know. But now he wasn’t sure. Gansey wasn’t like anyone else, and suddenly Adam wasn’t sure that he really wanted him to be.

Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.

How neatly the truth worked.

“I hear if you want magic done,” he said, “you ask a magician.”

Pain was a wondrous thing that way; it always worked. But back when he’d lived at home, he’d gotten used to the idea of that sort of intimate violence. Now, though, enough days had passed that he had stopped expecting it, which made the sudden possibility of it somehow more intolerable.

But in my head, everything is always so tangled. I am such a damaged thing.

Persephone had told him that no one had to know his past if he didn’t want them to.

He didn’t want them to.

Doubt suddenly tore blackly through him. It was a thing, this doubt, it had weight, and body, and legs —

I can’t do this, Blue thought suddenly. Her heart couldn’t manage it, being afraid.

But what do I see on your shoulders? Oh, failure is what you’re wearing these days, I see — it matches your eyes. You’ve tried this before, faulty dreamer, but you’ve got more passion than accuracy, don’t you?”