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

by Maggie Stiefvater

He was like Cabeswater: a maker of dreams. If he didn’t know the difference between waking and sleeping, it was because the difference didn’t matter to him.

There is no good word for the opposite of lonesome. One might be tempted to suggest togetherness or contentment, but the fact that these two other words bear definitions unrelated to each other perfectly displays why lonesome cannot be properly mirrored. It does not mean solitude, nor alone, nor lonely, although lonesome can contain all of those words in itself.

I don’t want to go home where everything is strange, and I don’t want to go back to school where everything is normal.

“I’m tired of it,” Noah said. “Tired of what?” Gansey asked, voice kind. “Decaying.”

Ronan was always saying that he never lied, but he wore a liar’s face.

It was Tad Carruthers, whose worst fault was that Adam didn’t like him and Tad couldn’t tell.

How ungrateful they’d become, how greedy for better wonders.

But what she didn’t realize about Blue and her boys was that they were all in love with one another.

No one remembers a corpse.

There was no point telling himself not to fight with Ronan. They would fight again, because Ronan was still breathing.

He was so much more dangerous when he wasn’t angry.

It reminded him that he was existing now and no other time.

As always, Adam was reminded of how Ronan belonged in this place. Something about the familiar way he stood as he searched for ripe fruit implied that he had done it many times before. It made it easy to understand that Ronan had grown up here and would grow old here. Easy to see how to exile him was to excise his soul.

How unfair she’d been to assume love and money would preclude pain and hardship.

Strangely enough, Ronan belonged here, too, just as he had at the Barns. This noisy, lush religion had created him just as much as his father’s world of dreams; it seemed impossible for all of Ronan to exist in one person.

Adam was beginning to realize that he hadn’t known Ronan at all. Or rather, he had known part of him and assumed it was all of him.

It was possible that there were two gods in this church.

I know you are not the same as him, Adam said. But in my head, everything is always so tangled. I am such a damaged thing.

“Weapons and poetry go hand in hand.”

Mornings like this one were made for memories.

Was that what life did to them all? Chiseled them into harder, truer versions of themselves?

Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.

I was here. I exist. I’m alive, because I bleed.

Desire and dread lay right next to each other in his heart, each sharpening the other.

But Blue Sargent was brave because she was afraid.