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Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before … — EDGAR ALLAN POE
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. — OSCAR WILDE
bearing a handgun and a heart full of hurt.
It wasn’t a night for her ordinary eyes. It was a night for seers and psychics, witches and mediums.
Aglionby Academy was the number one reason Blue had developed her two rules: One, stay away from boys, because they were trouble. And two, stay away from Aglionby boys, because they were bastards.
He was so young — that was the hardest part to get used to.
Is this how we make our way to death? Blue wondered. A stumbling fade-out instead of a self-aware finale?
“Is that all?” she whispered. Gansey closed his eyes. “That’s all there is.”
Ronan was silent for a long moment. He was good at silence; he knew it made people uncomfortable. But Gansey was immune from long exposure.
His heart hurt with the wanting of it, the hurt no less painful for being difficult to explain.
“What’s Ashley?”
Ronan didn’t sound very interested, but that was part of the Ronan Lynch brand. It was impossible to tell how deep his disinterest truly was.
The key, Gansey found, was that you had to believe that they existed; you had to realize they were part of something bigger. Some secrets only gave themselves up to those who’d proven themselves worthy. The way Gansey saw it was this: If you had a special knack for finding things, it meant you owed the world to look.
Something inside him said that this unconscious speech meant the start of something different, although he didn’t know what yet.
“Fate,” Blue replied, glowering at her mother, “is a very weighty word to throw around before breakfast.”
Adam was very good at watching without being watched. Only Gansey ever seemed to catch him at it.
And everywhere, everywhere, there were books. Not the tidy stacks of an intellectual attempting to impress, but the slumping piles of a scholar obsessed. Some of the books weren’t in English. Some of the books were dictionaries for the languages that some of the other books were in. Some of the books were actually Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Editions.
As always, there was an all-American war hero look to him, coded in his tousled brown hair, his summer-narrowed hazel eyes, the straight nose that ancient Anglo-Saxons had graciously passed on to him. Everything about him suggested valor and power and a firm handshake.
There were two Ganseys: the one who lived inside his skin, and the one Gansey put on in the morning when he slid his wallet into the back pocket of his chinos. The former was troubled and passionate, with no discernible accent to Adam’s ears, and the latter bristled with latent power as he greeted people with the slippery, handsome accent of old Virginia money. It was a mystery to Adam how he could not seem to see both versions of Gansey at the same time.
“I’ve been dead for seven years,” Noah said. “That’s as warm as they get.”
Ronan was earnest even if he was horrible, and with Gansey, honesty was golden.
he was wondering if it was more than the ordinary curiosity people possessed when faced with Gansey and his obsessive accessories.
The tallest of them knocked his head on the green cut-glass light hanging over the table; the others laughed generously at him. He said, Bitch.
this the way life is supposed to be? Maybe it would be better not to know.
a soldier in a war where the enemy was everyone else.
“I am not a prostitute.”
LOL
Ronan released a string of profanity so varied and pointed that Gansey was amazed that the words alone didn’t slay Declan.
Sometimes, after Adam had been hit, there was something remote and absent in his eyes, like his body belonged to someone else. When Ronan was hit, it was the opposite; he became so urgently present that it was as if he’d been sleeping before.
Even when they were quiet, people really were the noisiest animals.
What she wanted was to see something no one else could see or would see, and maybe that was asking for more magic than was in the world.
His face was just strange enough that she wanted to keep looking at it.
She smiled in reply. It felt like a very dangerous thing, that smile,
More than anything, the journal wanted. It wanted more than it could hold, more than words could describe, more than diagrams could illustrate. Longing burst from the pages, in every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every dark-printed definition. There was something pained and melancholy about it.
Sometimes, Gansey felt like his life was made up of a dozen hours that he could never forget.
“What if I implement a no-pets policy at the apartment?” “Well, hell, man,” Ronan replied, with a savage smile, “you can’t just throw out Noah like that.”
Everyone dreamed, only some forgot.
Ronan had called Gansey “the S.R.F.,” where the S stood for Soft, the R stood for Rich, and the F for something else.
Ronan kept staring at Whelk. He was good at staring. There was something about his stare that took something from the other person.
“Ostendes tuum et ostendam meus?”
Somehow seeing his parents always reminded him of how little he’d accomplished,
The poor are sad they’re poor, Adam had once mused, and turns out the rich are sad they’re rich. And Ronan had said, Hey, I’m rich, and it doesn’t bother me.
So many things survived here without really living.
Adam closed his eyes for a minute. Gansey could see his irises moving underneath the thin skin of his eyelids, a dreamer awake.
Oh no. Not him. All this time she’d been wondering how Gansey might die and it turned out she was going to strangle him.
she wanted something like that, a bond strong enough to transcend words.
When Gansey was polite, it made him powerful. When Adam was polite, he was giving power away.
The approval of someone like him, who clearly cared for no one, seemed like it would be worth more.
Something about Gansey made her feel so strongly other that it was as if she had to guard her emotions against him.
Gansey disliked having his kindness appealed to, especially when it had to war with his desire for sleep.
