Quotes by Maggie Stiefvater

She tried to ignore that, this close to the man, he had the overpowering chemical scent of a manly shower gel. The sort that normally came in a black bottle, and was called something like SHOCK or EXCITE or BLUNT TRAUMA.

What?” he asked in a low voice.“You looked like you spent your last joy bill.”He hissed, “What does that even mean?”“I don’t know. I was just trying it out.”“Well, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t make sense. And anyway, I’ve got plenty of joy bills. Loads.”Helen said, “What’s happening there on your phone?”“A very small joy debit.”His older sister’s smile shone brightly. “You see, it does work. Now, did you or did you not need to get out of that room?”Gansey inclined his head in slight acknowledgment. Gansey siblings knew each other well.“You’re so welcome,” Helen said. “Let me know if you need me to write a joy check.”“I really don’t think it works.

Noah had wandered down the aisle, but now he gleefully returned with a snow globe. He stood behind Ronan until he pushed off the shelf to admire the atrocity. Glitter, whispered Noah reverentially, giving it a shake.

Whats happening here? This last bit was hissed to Ronan and Noah. Noah took a personal day.I lost... Noah struggled for words. There wasnt air. It went away. The - the line!The ley line? Gansey asked.Noah nodded once, a sloppy thing that was sort of a shrug at the same time. There was nothing ... left for me. Releasing Ronan, he shook out his hands. Youre welcome, man, Ronan snarled. He still couldnt feel his toes.Thanks. I didnt mean to ... you were there. Oh, the glitter.Yes, Ronan replied crossly. The glitter.

At this, Gansey rolled over onto his back and folded his hands on his chest. He wore a salmon polo shirt, which, in Blue’s opinion, was far more hellish than anything they’d discussed to this point.

As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air.

You could write a book about things that you cant find on-line.

I wanted a library like this...[] A cave of words that Id made myself.

I smiled at the stacks, inhaling again. Hundreds of thousands of pages that had never been turned, waiting for me. The shelves were a warm, blond wood, piled with spines of every color. Staff picks were arranged on tables, glossy covers reflecting the light back at me. Behind the little cubby where the cashier sat, ignoring us, stairs covered with rich burgundy carpet led up to the worlds unknown. I could just live here, I said.

There was nothing particularly special about her, except that she was good with numbers, and very good at lying, and she made her home in between the pages of books.

My whole life, I had thought that my story was, again and again: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and he had to risk everything to keep what he loved. But really, the story was: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his fear ate him alive.

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 dont believe him. Nothing is completely harmless.

Instead, though, as he drew nearer, his mind kept drifting back to Ganseys voice in the cave the day before. The tremulous note in it. The fear - a fear so profound that Gansey could not bring himself to climb out of the pit, though there was nothing physically preventing him. He had not known that Richard Gansey III had it in him to be a coward.Adam remembered crouching on the kitchen floor of his parents double-wide, telling himself to take Ganseys oft-repeated advice to leave. Just put what you need in the car, Adam.But he had stayed. Hung in the pit of his fathers anger. A coward, too.Adam felt like he needed to reconfigure every conversation hed ever had with Gansey in light of this new knowledge.

Boys, she says, just arent very good at being afraid.

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.

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 medicines 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 youre welcome.Blue was appropriately touched. Ah, thanks, man.No problem, bro.

Was it okay? Adam had turned down so many offers of help from Gansey. Money for school, money for food, money for rent. Pity and charity, Adam had thought. For so long, hed wanted Gansey to see him as an equal, but it was possible that all this time, the only person who needed to see that was Adam. Now he could see that it wasnt charity Gansey was offering. It was just truth. And something else: friendship of the unshakable kind. Friendship you could swear on. That could be busted nearly to breaking and come back stronger than before.

Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasnt all-encompassing, that wasnt blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that shed had this kind, she didnt want another.

Pain was a torn piece of paper.

I pressed my hand against her hair, holding her to me, filled with the certainty that she was going to hurt me again and that I didnt have the strength to push her away before she did.