It was funny, the Gray Man thought, how humorous she always appeared, how that smile was always just a moment away from her lips. 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. And here was the other trick: Maura was not faking her happiness. She was both very happy and very sad.
These days, they all had their hands thrust into the sky, hoping for comets.
He sucked in more longing with every inhale, he exhaled some of his happiness on the other side. How miserable.
Adam had plenty of reasons to be indifferent about Gansey’s nebulous anxiety, his questioning of why the universe had chosen him to be born to affluent parents, wondering if there was some greater purpose that he was alive. Gansey knew he had to make a difference, had to make a bigger mark on the world because of the head start he’d been given, or he was the worst sort of person out there.
They were difficult things to unmake, dreamers. So much of a dreamer didn’t exist inside a physical body. So many complicated parts of them snarled in the stars and tangled in tree roots. So much of them fled down rivers and exploded through the air between raindrops.
Declan hated that he loved someone who wasn’t real.
The music video will die when we all go blind, and music will never die, because even when you can’t hear it, you can feel it.
There are fates worse than death.
MURDERED The writing continued until the driver’s side glass was clear, entirely swept clean by an invisible finger, until there were so many words that none of them could be read. Until it was only a window into an empty car with the memory of a burger on the passenger seat. ‘Noah,’ Gansey said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ Blue wiped away a tear. ‘Me too.’ Stepping forward, leaning over the hood of the car, Ronan pressed his fingers to the windshield, and while they watched, he wrote: REMEMBERED.
He looked like his brother, in a harder way, like Declan Lynch had been inserted into a pencil sharpener and Ronan Lynch had been taken out after Declan’s teeth were even; Ronan’s were bared. Declan’s eyes were narrow; Ronan’s were arrow slits. Declan’s hair was curled; Ronan’s was obliterated. Declan looked like the kind of person you forgot you’d ever seen. Ronan looked like the kind of person that made you cross to the other side of the street.
Adam twisted off the lid. Inside was a colorless lotion that smelled of mist and moss. Replacing the lid with a frown, he turned the container over, looking for more identifying features. On the bottom, Ronan’s handwriting labeled it merely: manibus. For your hands.
Persephone barely told anybody anything even when it wasn’t a secret.
Gansey knew enough people with secrets not to be dazzled into easily using them as currency.
It was so impossible to live life backward.
Love in the high desert is a strange thing. There is something about the climate – the remoteness, the severity of the seasons, the dryness of the air, the extreme beauty – that makes people feel more deeply. Perhaps without trees or cities to dampen the enormity of the feelings, they spread out hugely. Perhaps the hard-packed dust of the San Luis Valley amplifies them, like a shout into a canyon.
You could love the sleek, efficient beauty of a brand-new bullet train, but only a fool could imagine it would love you back.
They continued standing there, looking like a pair of horror movie twins, one dark, one light.
It’s not always running away. To leave.
The stars moved slowly above her, an array of possibilities, and for the first time in a long time, she felt them mirrored in her heart.
There was something warming, Ronan thought, about all of them burying a body on his behalf.