Raven Cycle Quotes

My words are unerring tools of destruction, and I’ve come unequipped with the ability to disarm them.

In that moment, Blue was a little in love with all of them. Their magic. Their quest. Their awfulness and strangeness. Her raven boys.

While I'm gone," Gansey said, pausing, "dream me the world. Something new for every night.

She wasn't interested in telling other people's futures. She was interested in going out and finding her own.

Is this thing safe?" "Safe as life," Gansey replied.

His feelings for Adam were an oil spill; he'd let them overflow and now there wasn't a damn place in the ocean that wouldn't catch fire if he dropped a match.

If I were a tree, I would have no reason to love a human.

I am being perfectly fucking civil.

Ronan said, "I'm always straight." Adam replied "Oh, man, that's the biggest lie you've ever told.

Gansey had once told Adam that he was afraid most people didn't know how to handle Ronan. What he meant by this was that he was worried that one day someone would fall on Ronan and cut themselves.

If you never saw the stars, candles were enough.

We have to be back in three hours," Ronan said. "I just fed Chainsaw but she'll need it again." "This," Gansey replied "is precisely why I didn't want to have a baby with you.

Adam smiled cheerily. Ronan would start wars and burn cities for that true smile, elastic and amiable.

I wish you could be kissed, Jane,' he said. 'Because I would beg just one off you. Under all this.' He flailed an arm toward the stars.

He was a book, and he was holding his final pages, and he wanted to get to the end to find out how it went, and he didn't want it to be over.

You are being self-pitying." "I'm nearly done. You don't have much more of this to bear." "I like you better this way." "Crushed and broken," Gansey said. "Just the way women like 'em.

The head is too wise. The heart is all fire.

And Ronan was everything that was left: molten eyes and a smile made for war.

She wore a dress Ronan thought looked like a lampshade. Whatever sort of lamp it belonged on, Gansey clearly wished he had one. Ronan wasn't a fan of lamps.

When Gansey was polite, it made him powerful. When Adam was polite, he was giving power away.

They were always walking away from him. But he never seemed able to walk away from them.

He was brother to a liar and brother to an angel, son of a dream and son of a dreamer.

She recognized the strange happiness that came from loving something without knowing why you did, that strange happiness that was sometimes so big that it felt like sadness.

Fate," Blue replied, glowering at her mother, "is a very weighty word to throw around before breakfast.

I know when I'm awake and when I'm asleep," Ronan Lynch said. Adam Parrish, curled over himself in a pair of battered, greasy coveralls, asked, "Do you?" "Maybe I dreamt you," he said. "Thanks for the straight teeth, then," Adam replied.

What a strange constellation they all were.

It wasn't that Henry was less of himself in English. He was less of himself out loud. His native language was thought.

No homework. I got suspended,” Blue replied. “Get the fuck out,” Ronan said, but with admiration. “Sargent, you asshole.

You missed World Hist." "Did you get notes for me?" "No. I thought you were dead in a ditch.

I guess now would be a good time to tell you," He said. "I took Chainsaw out of my dreams.

Gansey's partying with his mother," Ronan said. He smelled like beer. "And Noah's fucking dead. But Parrish is here.

In his head, his mother said, 'People shout when they don’t have the vocabulary to whisper'.

How do you feel about helicopters?" There was a long pause. "How do you mean? Ethically?" "As a mode of transportation." "Faster than camels, but less sustainable.

I don't care to be pretty," Blue shot back hotly, "I care to look on the outside like I look on the inside.

Making Ronan Lynch smile felt as charged as making a bargain with Cabeswater. These were not forces to play with.

Adam had once told Gansey, "Rags to riches isn't a story anyone wants to hear until after it's done.

Silence was never a wrong answer.

Dying's a boring side effect.

Blue tried not to look at Gansey's boat shoes; she felt better about him as a person if she pretended he wasn't wearing them.

I guess I make things that need energy stronger. I'm like a walking battery." "You're the table everyone wants at Starbucks," Gansey mused as he began to walk again. Blue blinked. "What?" Over his shoulder, Gansey said, "Next to the wall plug.

He strode over to the ruined church. This, Blue had discovered, was how Gansey got places - striding. Walking was for ordinary people.

Adam was beginning to realize that he hadn't known Ronan at all. Or rather, he had known part of him and assumed it was all of him.

So what you're saying is you can't explain it." "I did explain it." "No, you used nouns and verbs together in a pleasing but illogical format.

Blue,” he warned, but his voice was chaotic. This close, his throat was scented with mint and wool sweater and vinyl car seat, and Gansey, just Gansey. She said, “I just want to pretend. I want to pretend that I could.

Don't tell the others," Gansey said. "I'm dead," Noah replied, "not stupid.

I think they're here because I thought they ought to be here," Gansey said. Blue replied sarcastically. "Okay, God.

He hadn't realized yet that Gansey could persuade even the sun to pause and give him the time.

Where the hell is Ronan?" Gansey asked, echoing the words that thousands of humans had uttered since mankind developed speech.

The way Gansey saw it was this: if you had a special knack for finding things, it meant you owed the world to look.

Reality's what other people dream for you.

Adam lived in an apartment located above the office of St. Agnes Catholic Church, a fortuitous combination that focused most of the objects of Ronan's worship into one downtown block.

He left bloody fingerprints on the rock, but there was something satisfying about that. I was here. I exist. I’m alive, because I bleed.

You're asking me to define an abstract concept that no one has managed to explain since time began. You sort of sprang it on me," Gansey said. "Why do we breathe air? Because we love air? Because we don't want to suffocate. Why do we eat? Because we don't want to starve. How do I know I love her? Because I can sleep after I talk to her. Why?

What do you want, Adam? To feel awake when my eyes are open.

It was mint and memories and the past and the future and she felt as if she’d done this before and already she longed to do it again.

If you can’t be unafraid, Henry said, be afraid and happy.

Sometimes Ronan thought Adam was so used to the right way being painful that he doubted any path that didn’t come with agony.

And here was Ronan, like a heart attack that never stopped.

You really didn't see the sadness or the longing unless you already knew it was there. But that was the trick, wasn't it? Everyone had their disappointment and their baggage; only, some people carried it in their inside pockets and not on their backs.

Arbores loqui latine. The trees speak Latin.

Is that all?" she whispered. Gansey closed his eyes. "That's all there is.

Boys like him didn't die; they got bronzed and installed outside public libraries.

Don't panic. Are you sitting? You probably don't need to sit. Well, possibly. At least lean on something.

I never taught him to break his thumb." "That's Gansey for you. Only learns enough to be superficially competent." "Loser," Ronan agreed, and he was himself again.

Trees in your eyes ... Stars in your heart.

I'm not asking him to stay, Ronan thought. Only to come back.

Ronan's second secret was Adam Parrish.

He danced on the knife’s edge between awareness and sleep. When he dreamt like this, he was a king. The world was his to bend. His to burn.

I’ve been dead for seven years, that’s as warm as they get.

Ronan didn't need physics. He could intimidate even a piece of plywood into doing what he wanted.

It was a sort of ferocious, quiet beauty, the sort that wouldn't let you admire it. The sort of beauty that always hurt.

Humans were so circular; they lived the same slow cycles of joy and misery over and over, never learning. Every lesson in the universe had to be taught billions of times, and it never stuck. Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.

Behind him, he heard Ronan say, "I like the way you losers thought Instagram before first aid. Fuck off.

The kitchen window groaned open, and Jimi shouted out, “Blue! Your boys are out front, looking like they’re fixing to bury a body.” Again? Blue thought.

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.

The choice was death or hurting Adam, which wasn’t much of a choice at all.

When Adam kissed him, it was every mile per hour Ronan had ever gone over the speed limit. It was every window-down, goose-bumps-on-skin, teeth-chattering-cold night drive. It was Adam’s ribs under Ronan’s hands and Adam’s mouth on his mouth, again and again and again. It was stubble on his lips and Ronan having to stop, to get his breath, to restart his heart. They were both hungry animals, but Adam had been starving for far longer.

In some parallel universe, there was a Gansey who could tell Blue that he found the ten inches of her bare calves far more tantalizing than the thirteen cubic feet of bare skin Orla sported. But in this universe, that was Adam’s job. He was in a terrible mood.

When Ronan thought of Gansey, he thought of moving into Monmouth Manufacturing, of nights spent in companionable insomnia, of a summer searching for a king, of Gansey asking the Gray Man for his life. Brothers.

Noah crouched over Gansey's body. He said, for the last time, 'You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.' Gansey died. 'Goodbye,' Noah said. 'Don't throw it away.' He quietly slid from time.

I found it." "People find pennies," Gansey replied. "Or car keys. Or four-leaf clovers." "And ravens," Ronan said. "You're just jealous 'cause" - at this point, he had to stop to regroup his beer-sluggish thoughts - "you didn't find one, too.

To think you could have been dreaming the cure for cancer," Blue said. "Look, Sargent," Ronan retorted, "I was gonna dream you some eye cream last night since clearly modern medicine's doing jack shit for you, but I nearly had my ass handed to me by a death snake from the fourth circle of dream hell, so you're welcome." Blue was appropriately touched. "Ah, thanks, man." "No problem, bro.

You can be just friends with people, you know," Orla said. "I think it's crazy how you're in love with all those raven boys." Orla wasn't wrong, of course. But what she didn't realize about Blue and her boys was that they were all in love with one another. She was no less obsessed with them than they were with her, or one another, analyzing every conversation and gesture, drawing out every joke into a longer and longer running gag, spending each moment either with one another or thinking about when next they would be with one another. Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn't all-encompassing, that wasn't blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she'd had this kind, she didn't want the other.

In the end, he was nobody to Adam, he was nobody to Ronan. Adam spit his words back at him and Ronan squandered however many second chances he gave him. Gansey was just a guy with a lot of stuff and a hole inside him that chewed away more of his heart every year.

Want and need were words that got eaten smaller and smaller: Freedom, autonomy, a perennial bank balance, a stainless-steel condo in a dustless city, a silky black car, to make out with Blue, eight hours of sleep, a cell phone, a bed, to kiss Blue just once, a blister-less heel, bacon for breakfast, to hold Blue's hand, one hour of sleep, toilet paper, deodorant, a soda, a minute to close his eyes. What do you want, Adam? To feel awake when my eyes are open.

Being Adam Parrish was a complicated thing, a wonder of muscles and organs, synapses and nerves. He was a miracle of moving parts, a study in survival. The most important thing to Adam Parrish, though, had always been free will, the ability to be his own master. This was the important thing. It had always been the important thing. This was what it was to be Adam.

Inside, they pretended they would dream, but they did not. They sprawled on the living room sofa and Adam studied the tattoo that covered Ronan's back: all the sharp edges that hooked wondrously and fearfully into each other. 'Unguibus et rostro,' Adam said. Ronan put Adam's fingers to his mouth. He was never sleeping again.

It kills Dittleys and does terrible things to my friend." "YOUR DEAD FRIEND." "That's not his fault. Why didn't you say you could see him?" "I DIDN'T SAY I COULD SEE YOU, EITHER." "But I'm not dead." "BUT YOU ARE PRETTY SHORT.

I'm glad you misdialed." "Well. Easy mistake to make," she said. Might do it again." A very, very long pause. She opened her mouth to fill it, then changed her mind and didn't. She was shivering again, even though she wasn't cold with the pillow on her legs. "Shouldn't," Gansey said finally. "But I hope you do.

From the passenger seat, Ronan began to swear at Adam. It was a long, involved swear, using every forbidden word possible, often in compound-word form. As Adam stared at his lap, penitent, he mused that there was something musical about Ronan when he swore, a careful and loving precision to the way he fit the words together, a black-painted poetry. It was far less hateful sounding than when he didn’t swear. Ronan finished with, “For the love of … Parrish, take some care, this is not your mother’s 1971 Honda Civic.” Adam lifted his head and said, “They didn’t start making the Civic until ’73.

As they moved through the old barn, Adam felt Ronan’s eyes glance off him and away, his disinterest practiced but incomplete. Adam wondered if anyone else noticed. Part of him wished they did and immediately felt bad, because it was vanity, really: See, Adam Parrish is wantable, worthy of a crush, not just by anyone, someone like Ronan, who could want Gansey or anyone else and chose Adam for his hungry eyes.

Are you really going to work in that?" Maura asked. Blue looked at her clothing. It involved a few thin layering shirts, including one she had altered using a method called shredding. "What's wrong with it?" Maura shrugged. "Nothing. I always wanted an eccentric daughter. I just never realised how well my evil plans were working.

There is no good word for the opposite of lonesome. One might be tempted to suggest togetherness or contentment , but the fact that these two other words bear definitions unrelated to each other perfectly displays why lonesome cannot be properly mirrored. It does not mean solitude, nor alone, nor lonely, although lonesome can contain all of those words in itself. Lonesome means a state of being apart. Of being other. Alone-some.

His eyes were frighteningly alive, the curve of his mouth savage and pleased. It suddenly didn't seem at all surprising that he should be able to pull things from his dreams. In that moment, Blue was a little in love with all of them. Their magic. Their quest. Their awfulness and strangeness. Her raven boys.

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!

A secret is a strange thing. There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid. And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it. Sometimes, some rare times, a secret stays undiscovered because it is something too big for the mind to hold. It is too strange, too vast, too terrifying to contemplate. All of us have secrets in our lives. We’re keepers or keptfrom, players or played. Secrets and cockroaches — that’s what will be left at the end of it all.

Adam finally sat down on one of the pews. Laying his cheek against the smooth back of it, he looked at Ronan. Strangely enough, Ronan belonged here, too, just as he had at the Barns. This noisy, lush religion had created him just as much as his father's world of dreams; it seemed impossible for all of Ronan to exist in one person. Adam was beginning to realize that he hadn't known Ronan at all. Or rather, he had known part of him and assumed it was all of him. The scent of Cabeswater, all trees after rain, drifted past Adam, and he realized that while he'd been looking at Ronan, Ronan had been looking at him.

No homework. I got suspended,” Blue replied. “Get the fuck out,” Ronan said, but with admiration. “Sargent, you asshole.” Blue reluctantly allowed him to bump fists with her as Gansey eyed her meaningfully in the rearview mirror. Adam swivelled the other way in his seat – to the right, instead of to the left, so that he was peering around the far side of the headrest. It made him look as if he were hiding, but Blue knew it was just because it turned his hearing ear instead of his deaf ear towards them. “For what?” “Emptying another student’s backpack over his car. I don’t really want to talk about it.” “I do,” Ronan said. “Well, I don’t. I’m not proud of it.” Ronan patted her leg. “I’ll be proud for you.

There were many versions of Gansey, but this one had been rare since the introduction of Adam's taming presence. It was also Ronan's favorite. It was the opposite of Gansey's most public face, which was pure control enclosed in a paper-thin wrapper of academia. But this version of Gansey was Gansey the boy. This was the Gansey who bought the Camaro, the Gansey who asked Ronan to teach him to fight, the Gansey who contained every wild spark so that it wouldn't show up in other versions. Was it the shield beneath the lake that had unleashed it? Orla's orange bikini? The bashed-up remains of his rebuilt Henrietta and the fake IDs they'd returned to? Ronan didn't really care. All that mattered was that something had struck the match, and Gansey was burning.

When she opened her eyes, she was both in her body and watching it, nowhere near the cavity of the tree. The Blue that was before her stood inches from a boy in an Aglionby sweater. There was a slight stoop to his posture, and his shoulders were spattered darkly with rain. It was his fingers that Blue felt on her face. He touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers. Tears coursed down the other Blue's face. Though some strange magic, Blue could feel them on her face as well. She could feel, too, sick, rising misery she'd felt in the churchyard, the grief that felt bigger than her. The other Blue's tears seemed endless. One drop slid after another, each following an identical path down her cheeks. The boy in the Aglionby sweater leaned his forehead against Blue's. She felt the pressure of his skin against hers, and suddenly she could smell mint. It'll be okay. Gansey told the other Blue. She could tell that he was afraid. It'll be okay. Impossibly, Blue realized that this other Blue was crying because she loved Gansey. And that the reason Gansey touched her like that, his fingers so careful with her, was because he knew that her kiss could kill him. She could feel how badly the other Blue wanted to kiss him, even as she dreaded it. Though she couldn't understand why, her real, present day memories in the tree cavity were clouded with other false memories of their lips nearly touching, a life this other Blue had already lived. Okay, I'm ready- Gansey's voice caught, just a little. Blue, kiss me.