Chain of Iron (The Last Hours, #2)

by Cassandra Clare

“Why,” he said, “are you not even wearing a hat?” “And cover up this hair?” Matthew indicated his golden locks with a flourish. “Would you blot out the sun?”

“Matthew has a habit of getting his heart broken. He seems to prefer a hopeless love.”

“You may fear what will happen if you speak your heart. You may wish to hide things because you fear hurting others. But secrets have a way of eating at relationships, Jamie. At love, at friendship—they undermine and destroy them until in the end you find you are bitterly alone with the secrets you kept.”

“Well, you know what they say,” said James. “All the best men are either married or Silent Brothers.”

“Is Christopher eating his wax pear?” she whispered back. “That can’t be healthy.”

For that matter, it could have been Alastair.” “Matthew,” Cordelia said furiously. “Must we keep bringing up my brother? Alastair may be many things, but he is not a murderer.” “I just like to blame him for things,” Matthew said a bit sheepishly.

“Because,” Ariadne said, “when you want something very much, you are willing to accept the shadow of that thing. Even if it is just a shadow.”

“My father used to tell me that sometimes you cannot reconcile with someone else. Sometimes you have to find that reconciliation on your own. Someone who broke your heart is often not the person who can mend it.”

“That love is complicated,” said Cordelia. “That it lies beside anger and hatred, because only those we truly love can truly disappoint us.”

Tell me, he had always wanted to say, what broke your heart, and let such bitterness spill out?

Alastair might prefer to keep lying to himself, but Thomas would not. “I suppose I’m asking if you’re like me.”

“They are human,” Magnus said. “It is not in their capability to understand that which by its nature is almost beyond understanding. They see demons as what they fight. They forget that there are unimaginable forces that can bend the laws of the universe. The gods are walking, Malcolm, and none of us are prepared.”

But love is not always a lightning bolt, is it? Sometimes it is a creeping vine. It grows slowly until suddenly it is all that there is in the world.”