Maggie Stiefvater

“The truth is, I feel myself being fascinated and repelled by her: She's both a mirror of myself and a door to part of this island that I'm not.”

“I love inventing interesting people and then pushing them to their absolute limits - and usually those absolute limits involve homicidal faeries, werewolves, or some other paranormal menace.”

“I built an idea in my head of the hero I wanted to be, a grab bag of traits from heroes, villains, and side characters. I did not have book role models, I had book blueprints.But there remained a huge gap between the person I wanted to be and the person who I was. This was because no matter how many book blueprints I had, as much as I wanted to make myself the hero of my own life, it didn’t matter as long as I kept telling the story wrong.Nowadays, as a storyteller, I know what the problem was. I had all the elements I needed to tell a good story. But I was telling it the wrong way, so I could never get to the ending I wanted.If you tell yourself you’re a winner, you know what kind of story you’re telling, and you will march toward that... Likewise, if you tell yourself you’re a loser, you’ve made that your story, and you will march toward that instead. The same setbacks could happen in the loser’s story as in the winner’s story, but the self-defined loser would let them be proof that they were never going to be anything.Here’s the story I was telling myself back when I was little edible child waiting to be carried away by hawks and making OCD rituals for herself: once upon a time, there was a girl who was afraid of everything. When I was 16, I realized that I knew what this story looked like and how it ended, and it wasn’t the life I wanted for myself. If I wanted my ending to look different, I needed to change the kind of story I was telling about myself. I needed to shape my events into a different genre: once upon a time, there was a woman who was afraid of nothing. At age 16, I legally changed my name from my birthname — Heidi — to one I thought sounded like the hero I wanted to be: Maggie. And I vowed that I would never be afraid of anything ever again.Did it work? No, of course not. Not right away. But it became a mission statement, my hero’s journey.”

“I was trying to decide if you still had free will as a wolf. If I was a terrible person for planning to drug my girlfriend and drag her back to my house to keep in the basement.”

“So here's my theory, and this is such crap science, I don't have to tell you. It's science without microscopes, blood tests, or reality.”

“His home was populated by things and creatures from Niall Lynch's dreams, and his mother was just another one of them”

“Derisively, Ronan said, 'No. The ancient Greeks didn't have a word for Blue.'Everyone at the table looked at him.'What the hell, Ronan?' said Adam.'It's hard to imagine," Gansey mused, 'how this evidently successful classical education never seems to make it into your school papers.''They never ask the right questions,' Ronan replied.”

“He keeps getting older while I'm not paying attention.”

“Ronan's bedroom door burst open. Hanging on the door frame, Ronan leaned out to peer past Gansey. He was doing that thing where he looked like both the dangerous Ronan he was now and the cheerier Ronan he had been when Gansey first met him."Hold on," Gansey told Adam. Then, to Ronan: "Why would he be?""No reason. Just no reason." Ronan slammed his door.Gansey asked Adam, "Sorry. You still have that suit for the party?"Adam's response was buried in the sound of the second-story door falling open. Noah slouched in. In a wounded tone, he said, "He threw me out the window!"Ronan's voice sang out from behind his closed door: "You're already dead!”

“I really love nature. I grew up in the country. But one of the things about nature is that it is beautiful but it's also very dangerous.”

“I feel like I have so many stories basting in my mind, and they come busting out when they're ready.”

“When did you get so smart?"He tapped his forehead. "Brain transplant. They put in a whale's. I'm passing all my classes with my eyes closed now, but I just can't get over this craving for krill." He shrugged. "And I feel sorry for the whale that got my brain. Probably swimming around Florida now trying to catch glimpses of girls in bikinis.”

“Please kiss that girl a million times.”

“Being the Magician isn't about being powerful when you have things and useless when you don't," Persephone said."The Magician sees what is out there and finds connections. The Magician can make anything magical.”

“As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there’s something below it, I won’t know it. But that’s part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn’t the ocean that killed my father, in the end. The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I’m perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me.”

“The walls of the arch are covered with blood-red jellies that wink and glisten at me by the light of the moon. My father told me they were completely harmless. I don't believe him. Nothing is completely harmless.”

“There was no sun; there was no light. I was dying. I couldn't remember what the sky looked like. But I didn't die. I was lost to a sea of cold, and then I was reborn into a world of warmth.”

“You two are too cute,” the counter girl said, setting two cups piled with whipped cream on the counter. She had a sort of lopsided, open smile that made me think she laughed a lot. “Seriously. How long have you been going out?”Sam let go of my hands to get his wallet and took out some bills. “Six years.”I wrinkled my nose to cover a laugh. Of course he would count the time that we’d been two entirely different species.Whoa.” Counter girl nodded appreciatively. “That’s pretty amazing for a couple your age."Sam handed me my hot chocolate and didn’t answer. But his yellow eyes gazed at me possessively—I wondered if he realized that the way he looked at me was far more intimate than copping a feel could ever be.I crouched to look at the almond bark on the bottom shelf in the counter. I wasn’t quite bold enough to look at either of them when I admitted, “Well, it was love at first sight.”The girl sighed. “That is just so romantic. Do me a favor, and don’t you two ever change. The world needs more love at first sight.”

“My chest ached, my body speaking a language my head didn't quite understand.”

“Cole,” I said, “do you think I’m lovable?”“As in ‘cuddly and’?”“As in ‘able to be loved,’” I said.Cole’s gaze was unwavering. Just for a moment, I had the strange idea that I could see exactly what he had looked like when he was younger, and exactly what he’d look like when he was older. It was piercing, a secret glimpse of his future. “Maybe,” he said. “But you won’t let anybody try.”I closed my eyes and swallowed. “I can’t tell the diference between not fighting,” I said,“and giving up.”Despite my eyelids being tightly shut, a single, hot tear ran out of my left eye. I was so angry that it had escaped. I was so angry.Beneath me, the bed tipped as Cole edged closer. I felt him lean over me. His breath, warm and measured, hit my cheek. Two breaths. Three. Four. I didn’t know what I wanted. Then I heard him stop breathing, and a second later, I felt his lips on my mouth. It wasn’t the sort of kiss I’d had with him before, hungry, wanting, desperate. It wasn’t the sort of kiss I’d had with anyone before. This kiss was so soft that it was like a memory of a kiss, so careful on my lips that it waslike a memory of a kiss, so careful on my lips that it was like someone running his fingers along them. My mouth parted and stilled; it was so quiet, a whisper, not a shout. Cole’s hand touched my neck, thumb pressed into theskin next to my jaw. It wasn’t a touch that said “I need more”. It was a touch that said “I want this.”It was all completely soundless. I didn’t think either of us was breathing.Cole sat back up, slowly, and I opened my eyes. His expression, as ever, was blank, the face he wore when something mattered.He said, “That’s how I would kiss you, if I loved you.”