—

“Genya—” David tried.
“Don’t you dare,” she said roughly, tears welling up again. “You never looked at me twice before I was like this, before I was broken. Now I’m just something for you to fix.”
I was desperate for words to soothe her, but before I could find any, David bunched up his shoulders and said, “I know metal.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Genya cried.
David furrowed his brow. “I … I don’t understand half of what goes on around me. I don’t get jokes or sunsets or poetry, but I know metal.” His fingers flexed unconsciously as if he were physically grasping for words. “Beauty was your armor. Fragile stuff, all show. But what’s inside you? That’s steel. It’s brave and unbreakable. And it doesn’t need fixing.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising

“You are Brother Zachariah, and my Jem. You are a Silent Brother. That does not mean you are not dear to me as you always were, and you always will be. Do you think anything could separate us? Is either of us so weak as that? After all, we have seen and all we have done? I spend every day grateful that you exist and are in the world. And as long as you live, we keep Will alive.”
― Cassandra Clare, A Deeper Love

“I was in this weird space of wanting not to be alone and wanting not to be crowded, either.”
― S.K. Ali, Love from A to Z

“My father was cursed," James said from the darkness. "Whereas I? I'm damned.”
― Cassandra Clare, The Bane Chronicles