Fiction is truth, even if it is not fact. If you believe only in facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die.
Value your parabatai,” he said. “For it is a precious bond. All love is precious. It is why we do what we do. Why do we fight demons? Why are they not fit custodians of this world? What makes us better? It is because they do not build, but destroy. They do not love, but hate only. We are human and fallible, we Shadowhunters. But if we did not have the capability to love, we could not guard humans; we must love to guard them. My parabatai, he loved like few ever could love, with all and everything. I see you are like that too; it burns more brightly in you than the fire of Heaven.
He can touch your soul. And there is a difference between having your heart break and having your soul shatter.
Laws are meaningless, child. There is nothing more important than love. And no law higher.
Hope is all that keeps us going sometimes, biscuit.
She looked up at him with a smile. The smile broke what was left of his resistance – shattered it. He had let the walls down when he’d thought she was gone, and there was no time to build them back up. Helplessly he pulled her against him. For a moment she clung to him tightly, warm and alive in his arms. Her hair brushed his cheek. The color had come back into the world; he could breathe again, and for that moment he breathed her in – she smelled of salt, blood, tears, and Tessa.
Life is short, and wisdom long to learn.
Nobody calls me ‘blondie’ and keeps their kneecaps.
There’s something about a place you’ve been with someone you love. It takes on a meaning in your mind. It becomes more than a place. It becomes a distillation of what you felt for each other. The moments you spend in a place with someone... they become part of its bricks and mortar. Part of its soul.
You are all that exists on the earth and under the sky that I do love.
She soared above the ground, and he kept her tethered to the earth. Without him she would be lost among the clouds.
A gentle boy with a gentle soul, but every soul contains its own opposite, and the opposite of gentleness was ruthlessness – the beautiful wreckage of mercy.
Some lights were never meant to burn for long.
I want you to be happy, and him to be happy. And yet when you walk that aisle to meet him and join yourselves forever you will walk an invisible path of the shards of my heart, Tessa. I would give over my own life for your happiness. I thought perhaps that when you told me you did not love me that my own feelings would fall away and atrophy, but they have not. They have grown every day. I love you now more desperately, this moment, than I have ever loved you before, and in an hour I will love you more than that.
As we all have an infinite capacity to make mistakes, we all have an infinite capacity for forgiveness.
Why all these paintings of you? Because I’m an artist, Emma. These pictures are my heart. And if my heart was a canvas, every square inch of it would be painted over with you.
We do not get to choose when in our lives we feel pain,” said Matthew. “It comes when it comes, and we try to remember, even though we cannot imagine a day when it will release its hold on us, that all pain fades. All misery passes. Humanity is drawn to light, not darkness.
The bad things can’t matter more than the good things.
As long as you exist and I exist, I will love you.
People aren’t born good or bad. Maybe they’re born with tendencies either way, but it’s the way you live your life that matters. And the people you know. Valentine was Hodge’s friend, and I don’t think Hodge really had anyone else in his life to challenge him or make him be a better person. If I’d had that life, I don’t know how I would have turned out. But I didn’t. I have my family. And I have you.