The Raven Cycle Quotes

“It had been a long time ago, but also, it was no time at all.

“Their magic. Their quest. Their awfulness and strangeness. Her raven boys.”

″ ‘You can be just friends with people, you know,’ Orla said. ‘I think it’s crazy how you’re in love with all those raven boys.’ ”

“Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.”

“All of us have secrets in our lives. We’re keepers or keptfrom, players or played. Secrets and cockroaches — that’s what will be left at the end of it all.”

“The only thing was, she didn’t really want to see the future. What she wanted was to see something no one else could see or would see, and maybe that was asking for more magic that was in the world.”

“If you never saw the stars, candles were enough.”

“Why do we breathe air? Because we love air? Because we don’t want to suffocate. Why do we eat? Because we don’t want to starve. How do I know I love her? Because I can sleep after I talk to her.”

“Sometimes, Gansey felt like his life was made up of a dozen hours that he could never forget.”

“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.”

″ ‘I don’t care to be pretty,’ Blue shot back hotly, ‘I care to look on the outside like I look on the inside.’ ”

“His heart hurt with the wanting of it, the hurt no less painful for being difficult to explain.”

“Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.”

“ ‘While I’m gone,’ Gansey said, pausing, ‘dream me the world. Something new for every night.’ ”

“It was a sort of ferocious, quiet beauty, the sort that wouldn’t let you admire it. The sort of beauty that always hurt.”

“There aren’t terrible ideas. Just ideas done terribly.”

“He was full of the restless, dissatisfied energy that always seemed to move into his heart after he visited home these days. It had something to do with the knowledge that his parents’ house wasn’t truly home anymore — if it had ever been — and something to do with the realization that they hadn’t changed; he had.”

“Blue liked how polite he was. It seemed different than Gansey’s politeness. When Gansey was polite, it made him powerful. When Adam was polite, he was giving power away.”

“There is no good word for the opposite of lonesome.”

“Humans were so circular; they lived the same slow cycles of joy and misery over and over, never learning. Every lesson in the universe had to be taught billions of times, and it never stuck.”

“Listening to him tell the story now, it was clear to Adam that Glendower was more than a historical figure to Gansey. He was everything Gansey wished he could be: wise and brave, sure of his path, touched by the supernatural, respected by all, survived by his legacy.”

“In that moment, Blue was a little in love with all of them.”

“Boys like him didn’t die; they got bronzed and installed outside public libraries.”

“Wanting to live, but accepting death to save others: that was courage. That was to be Gansey’s greatness.”

“Orla wasn’t wrong, of course. But what she didn’t realize about Blue and her boys was that they were all in love with one another. She was no less obsessed with them than they were with her, or one another, analyzing every conversation and gesture, drawing out every joke into a longer and longer running gag, spending each moment either with one another or thinking about when next they would be with one another.”