Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices Book 3)

by Cassandra Clare

“By the Angel, it just crushed Sophocles,” noted Will as the worm vanished behind a large structure shaped like a Greek temple. “Has no one respect for the classics these days?”

“That sometimes when you cannot decide what to do, you pretend you are a character in a book, because it is easier to decide what they would do.”

“Sometimes one must choose whether to be kind or honorable,” he said. “Sometimes one cannot be both.”

“You know that feeling,” she said, “when you are reading a book, and you know that it is going to be a tragedy; you can feel the cold and darkness coming, see the net drawing close around the characters who live and breathe on the pages. But you are tied to the story as if being dragged behind a carriage, and you cannot let go or turn the course aside.”

“The habits of years are not unlearned so quickly,” Tessa said, and her eyes were sad. “Do not make the mistake of believing that he does not love you because he plays at not caring, Cecily. Confront him if you must and demand the truth, but do not make the mistake of turning away because you believe that he is a lost cause. Do not cast him from your heart. For if you do, you will regret it.”

The good suffer, the evil flourish, and all that is mortal passes away.”

“Perhaps, but you would not exist without a woman, would you? However little use you may find us, we are cleverer and more determined and more patient than men. Men may be stronger, but it is women who endure.”

But you could not blame someone for dying.

“Zhe shi jie shang, wo shi zui ai ne de,”

Our hearts, they need a mirror, Tessa. We see our better selves in the eyes of those who love us. And there is a beauty that brevity alone provides.”

“I want you to be happy, and him to be happy. And yet when you walk that aisle to meet him and join yourselves forever you will walk an invisible path of the shards of my heart, Tessa. I would give over my own life for either of yours. I would give over my own life for your happiness. I thought perhaps that when you told me you did not love me that my own feelings would fall away and atrophy, but they have not. They have grown every day. I love you now more desperately, this moment, than I have ever loved you before, and in an hour I will love you more than that. It is unfair to tell you this, I know, when you can do nothing about it.” He took a shuddering breath. “How you must despise me.”

I can tell you that the end of a life is the sum of the love that was lived in it, that whatever you think you have sworn, being here at the end of Jem’s life is not what is important. It was being here for every other moment. Since you met him, you have never left him and never not loved him. That is what matters.”

“If there is a life after this one,” he said, “let me meet you in it, James Carstairs.”

Wo ai ni, Tessa. Bu lu run, he qing kuang fa sheng, wo men dou hui zai yi qi.

Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires. —Shakespeare, Macbeth

And I came to see that I could not bring someone home when they were already there.

“You said I am a good man,” he said. “But I am not that good a man. And I am—I am catastrophically in love with you.” “Will—” “I love you so much, so incredibly much,” he went on, “and when you’re this close to me, I forget who you are. I forget you’re Jem’s. I’d have to be the worst sort of person to think what I’m thinking right now. But I am thinking it.” “I loved Jem,” she said. “I love him still, and he loved me, but I am not anybody’s, Will. My heart is my own. It is beyond you to control it. It has been beyond me to control it.”

“There are so many worse things than death,” he said. “Not to be loved or not to be able to love: that is worse. And to go down fighting as a Shadowhunter should, there is no dishonor in that. An honorable death—I have always wanted that.”

She had fallen asleep with her head on his arm, the clockwork angel, still around her throat, resting against his shoulder, just to the left of his collarbone. As she moved away, the clockwork angel slipped free and she saw to her surprise that where it had lain against his skin it had left a mark behind, no bigger than a shilling, in the shape of a pale white star.

“We’ve called it a Portal,” said Henry. The capitalization of the word was very clear in his tone.

However, Gabriel reminded himself sternly, since they were most likely about to direct themselves all into mortal danger, thinking about whether Cecily was pretty ought not to be foremost on his mind. He told himself to stop immediately.

It was a near incomprehensible tangle, the three of them, but there was one certainty, and that was that there was no lack of love between them.

“We were engaged, Tessa. A proposal—an offer of marriage—is a promise. A promise to love and care for someone always. I did not mean to break mine to you. But it was that or die. I wanted to wait, to be married to you and live with you for years, but that wasn’t possible. I was dying too fast. I would have given it up—all of it up—to be married to you for a day.

“Change is not loss, Will. Not always.”

‘Go in peace, for as much as we have sworn, both of us, saying the Lord be between me and thee, forever.’

when I no longer see the world with my human eyes, I will still be in some part the Jem you knew, and I will see you with the eyes of my heart.”

“Wo men shi sheng si ji jiao,”

. . and cannot watch over him, if that is not too bold a thing to say, as closely as I would. But if any fraud or treachery is practicing against him, I hope that simple love and truth will be strong in the end. I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world. . . .”

The measure of love is to love without measure. —attributed to Saint Augustine

You are not the last dream of my soul. You are the first dream, the only dream I ever was unable to stop myself from dreaming. You are the first dream of my soul, and from that dream I hope will come all other dreams, a lifetime’s worth. With hope at last, Will Herondale

“Life is full of risks. Death is much simpler.”

“Those of us who do not live forever do not like change perhaps as much as those of you who do. I am tired of losing people,”

That you are not despairing. That you have in you an infinite capacity for

“Those of you who are mortal, you burn so fiercely. And you fiercer than most, Will. I will not ever forget you.”

It is not easy to be different, and even less so to be unique. But I begin to think I was never meant for an easy road.”

There is nothing about you that I can imagine not loving.

“That words have the power to change us. Your words have changed me, Tess; they have made me a better man than I would have been otherwise.

Life is a book, and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read. I would read them together with you, as many as I can, before I die—”

You said you loved the words of my heart, the shape of my soul. I remember. I remember every word you said from that day to this.

As if her love had given him his own shape-shifting ability, no matter how much time had passed, when she looked at him, she saw always the wild, black-haired boy she had fallen in love with.

Of the girl who had hit over the head with a water jug the boy who had come to rescue her, and how he had fallen in love with her in that instant.

I take your hand, brother, so that you may go in peace.

The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that, like the sound of Jem’s violin music, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent.

Most people are lucky to have even one great love in their life. You have found