As I pulled aside the linen curtain to the back room, I heard the front door open again. If it was Christina returning to make a second effort at my leggings, I was going to be forced to get loud, and I didn't like getting loud. But it wasn't Christina I heard at the front of the store. Instead, a very familiar voice said, "No, no, I'm looking for something very particular. Oh, wait, I just saw it." I turned around. Cole St. Clair smiled lazily at me. I gave so many damns at once that it actually hurt.

— Maggie Stiefvater

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.

— Maggie Stiefvater

As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there’s something below it, I won’t know it. But that’s part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn’t the ocean that killed my father, in the end. The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I’m perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me.

— Maggie Stiefvater

As they walked, a sudden rush of wind hurled low across the grass, bringing with it the scent of moving water and rocks hidden in shadows, and Blue thrilled again and again with the knowledge that magic was real, magic was real, magic was real.

— Maggie Stiefvater

A symptom," Brendan said, as if love were a disease only humans could catch. But there was something like fondness or respect in his voice. "You're both fools.

— Maggie Stiefvater

At this, Ganja 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.

— Maggie Stiefvater

Because it wasn't merely that the trees were speaking to them. It was that the trees themselves were sentient beings, capable of watching their movements. Was it only the trees in this strange wood, or did every tree observe their movements? Had they always been trying to speak to them? There was no way of knowing, either, if the trees were good of bad, if they lived or hatred humans, if they had principles or compassion. They were like aliens, Ganja thought. Aliens that we have treated very badly for a very long time.

— Maggie Stiefvater

Because Ni all Lynch was the biggest liar of them all, and he’d stuffed all of that into his eldest son. There was not much difference between a lie and a secret.

— Maggie Stiefvater

Because you have only known me for like fourteen seconds and seven of those were us making out, and you still know more about me than all of my friends in this stupid place.

— Maggie Stiefvater

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

— Maggie Stiefvater