Young Adult Authors

"There might be a God, Clary, and there might not, but I don't think it matters. Either way, we're on our own."

"Vials of holy water, blessed knives, steel and silver blades, electrum wire-- not much use at the moment, but it's always good to have a spare--silver bullets, charm of protection, crucifixes, stars of David-" "Jesus," said Clary. "I doubt he'd fit."

"When the self-congratulatory part of the evening is over, maybe we could get back to saving my best friend from being exsanguinated to death?"

"Where's Simon?" Clary interrupted. Isabelle wobbled. "He's a rat," she said darkly. "Did he do something to you?" Alec was full of brotherly concern. "Did he touch you? If he tried anything-" "No, Alec," Isabelle said irritably. "Not like that. He's a rat"

"If there was such a thing as terminal literalism, you'd have died in childhood,"

"Well, I'd certainly hate to interrupt your pleasant night stroll with my sudden death."

"To love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be destroyed."

"A diary with no drawings of me in it? Where are the torrid fantasies? The romance novel covers? The-"

"I didn't," said Jace. "At least, I didn't finish it. It's Magnus Bane." He grinned at Alec mockingly. "Rhymes with 'overcareful pain in the ass.'"

"Good idea," said Jace. "I shall be Baron Hotschaft Von Hugenstein."

"Don't order any of the faerie food," said Jace, looking at her over the top of his menu. "It tends to make humans a little crazy. One minute you're munching a faerie plum, the next minute you're running naked down Madison Avenue with antlers on your head. Not," he added hastily, "that this has ever happened to me."

"If you wanted me to rip my clothes off, you should have asked."

"I suppose you don't have much time for enjoying music," Clary said, thinking of Simon, for whom music was his entire life, "in your line of work." He shrugged. "Maybe the occasional wailing chorus of the damned."

"I always thought cab drivers didn't pay attention to traffic, but this is ridiculous,"

"Oh-Simon!" "No, I'm Jace," said Jace patiently. "Simon is the weaselly little one with the bad haircut and dismal fashion sense."

"Hodge sent me to wake you up. Actually, he offered to wake you up himself, but since it's five a.m., I figured you'd be less cranky if you had something nice to look at."

"He cut his glance toward Jace, who was walking a few paces ahead of them, apparently conversing with the cat. Clary wondered what they were talking about. Politics? Opera? The high price of tuna?"

"I thought it'd be something cooler, like a van with 'Death to Demons' painted on the outside, or . . ."

"He's probably never met a six-foot-tall hot elf-woman in a fur bikini, either,"

"Yeah, well, you clearly also couldn't be bothered to call me and tell me you were shacking up with some dyed-blond wanna-be goth you probably met at Pandemonium. After I spent the past three days wondering if you were dead." "I was not shacking up," Clary said, glad of the darkness as the blood rushed to her face. "And my hair is naturally blond," said Jace. "Just for the record."

"I've never asked, but I'm sure he has a fairly stringent policy about random teenagers lurking in his shrubbery."

"If you were half as funny as you thought you were, my boy, you'd be twice as funny as you are."

"Well there goes my plan for selling them on eBay," Clary muttered. "Selling them on what?" Clary smiled blandly at him. "A mythical place of great magical power."

"I figured all your classes were stuff like Slaughter 101 and Beheading for Beginners."

"You guessed? You must have been pretty sure, considering you could have killed me." "I was ninety percent sure." "I see," Clary said. There must have been something in her voice, because he turned to look at her. Her hand cracked across his face, a slap that rocked him back on his heels. He put his hand to his cheek, more in surprise than pain. "What the hell was that for?" "The other ten percent."

"Just because you call an electric eel a rubber duck doesn't make it a rubber duck, does it? And God help the poor bastard who decides they want to take a bath with the duckie."

"Is there anything I could get for you?" he asked. "Something to drink? Some tea?" "I don't want tea," said Clary, with a muffled force. "I want to find my mother. And then I want to find out who took her in the first place, and I want to kill them." "Unfortunately," said Hodge, "we're all out of bitter revenge at the moment, so it's either tea or nothing."

"Do you want to tell me what this is about, or should I just call the police?" "And tell them what?" Jace said witheringly. "That invisible people are bothering you? Trust me, little girl, the police aren't going to arrest someone they can't see."

"I'll get the coffee if you find us a seat. What do you want?" "Just coffee. Black – like my soul."

"Jesus!" Luke exclaimed. "Actually, it's just me," said Simon. "Although I've been told the resemblance is startling."

"Hi, I'm one of the knife-carrying hooligans you met last night in Pandemonium? I'm afraid I made a bad impression and was hoping you'd give me a chance to make it up to- " "SIMON!" Clary held the phone away from her ear as he cracked up laughing. "That is so not funny!"

"It's a girl," Jace said, recovering his composure. "Surely you've seen girls before, Alec. Your sister Isabelle is one."

"What?" Simon looked alarmed. "I'm not really sleeping with your mom, you know. I was just trying to get your attention. Not that your mom isn't a very attractive woman, for her age."

"Meanwhile," Simon added, "I wanted to tell you that lately I've been cross-dressing. Also, I'm sleeping with your mom. I thought you should know."

"People just liked Hassan, the way people like fast food and celebrities."

"(fills me with hope:) The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. I love the way John Green’s mind works. This book of essays traverses so many parts of our world—both elusive and quotidian—and demonstrates, ultimately, how remarkable it is to be human."

"I'm in love with cities I've never been to and people I've never met."

"Hank: "If you just say enough things, some of them will end up on those quote websites." // John: "Which, of course, is the point of being a person.""

"“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?”""

"I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark almost blue color, and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.” A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.""

"I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful."

"The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture."

"As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep; Slowly, and then all at once."

"That's the thing about pain," Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. "It demands to be felt."

"Sometimes you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read that book."

"But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.)"

"Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death."

"This is why we call people exes, I guess -- because the paths that cross in the middle end up separating at the end. It's too easy to see an X as a cross-out. It's not, because there's no way to cross out something like that. The X is a diagram of two paths."

"Being in a relationship, that's something you choose. Being friends, that's just something you are."

"Love is the most common miracle"