A Gathering of Shadows (Shades of Magic, #2)

by V.E. Schwab

Magic and magician must between them balance. Magic itself is chaos. The magician must be calm. A fractured self is a poor vessel for power, spilling power without focus or measure from every crack. —TIEREN SERENSE, head priest of the London Sanctuary

People survived by being cautious, but they got ahead by being bold.

And Lila had always thought of herself more as a weed than a rose bush.

Kell would say it was impossible. What a useless word, in a world with magic.

Maxim kept grudges like scars. They faded by degrees but always left a mark.

“Politics is a dance until the moment it becomes a war. And we control the music.”

“Strength and weakness are tangled things,” the Aven Essen had said. “They look so much alike, we often confuse them, the way we confuse magic and power.”

People either stole to stay alive or to feel alive. She had to imagine that they ran away for the same reasons.

If magic coursed through everyone and everything, was this what it felt like when it found itself again?

“Everyone thinks I have a death wish, you know? But I don’t want to die—dying is easy. No, I want to live, but getting close to death is the only way to feel alive. And once you do, it makes you realize that everything you were doing before wasn’t actually living. It was just making do. Call me crazy, but I think we do the best living when the stakes are high.”