Grace Lama > Grace's Quotes

“One does no question miracles, or complain that they are no constructed perfectly to one's liking.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“His eyes went soft and silver as she spoke. “Zhe shi jie shang, wo shi zui ai ne de,” he whispered.

She understood it. In all the world, you are what I love the most.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“He gazed amusedly down the table at Tessa. “You’re the shape-changer, aren’t you?” he said. “Magnus Bane told me about you. No mark on you at all, they say.”
Tessa swallowed and looked him straight in the eye. They were discordantly human eyes, ordinary in his extraordinary face. “No. No mark.”
He grinned around his fork. “I do suppose they’ve looked everywhere?”
“I’m sure Will’s tried,” said Jessamine in a bored tone.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“Our hearts, they need a mirror, Tessa. We see our better selves in the eyes of those who love us.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“He seemed to realize she was staring at him, because the cursing stopped. "You cut me," he said. His voice was pleasant. British. Very ordinary. He looked at his hand with critcal interest. "It might be fatal."
Tessa looked at him with wide eyes. "Are you the Magister?"
He tilted his hand to the side. Blood ran down it, spattering the floor. "Dear me, massive blood loss. Death could be imminent.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“Though Will was saying earlier,” Tessa added, “that heroes all come to bad ends, and he could not imagine why anyone would want to be one, anyway.”
“Ah.” Jem’s hand squeezed hers briefly, and then let it go. “Well, Will is looking at it from the hero’s viewpoint, isn’t he? But as for the rest of us, it’s an easy answer.”
“Is it?”
“Of course.” His voice was almost a whisper now. “Heroes endure because we need them. Not for their own sakes. If Will …”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“What are you doing following me around the back streets of London, you little idiot?” Will demanded, giving her arm a light shake.

Cecily’s eyes narrowed. “This morning it was cariad (note: Welsh endearment, like ‘darling’ or ‘love’), now it’s idiot.”

“Oh, you’re using a Glamour rune. There’s one thing to declare, you are not afraid of anything when you live in the country. But this is London.”

“I’m not afraid of London,” Cecily said defiantly.

Will leaned closer, almost hissing in her ear *and said something very complicated in Welsh*

She laughed. “No, it wouldn’t do you any good to tell me to go home. You are my brother, and I want to go with you.”

Will blinked at her words.

You are my brother, and I want to go with you.

It was the sort of thing he was used to hearing Jem say.

Although Cecily was unlike Jem in every other conceivable possible way, she did share one quality with him. Stubbornness. When Cecily said she wanted something, it did not express an idle desire, but an iron determination.

“Do you even care where I’m going?” he said. “What if I were going to hell?”

“I’ve always wanted to see hell,” Cecily said. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“Most of us spend our time trying to stay out of it, Cecily. I’m going to an ifrit den, if you must know, to purchase drugs from vile, dissolute criminals. They may clap eyes on you, and decide to sell you.”

“Wouldn’t you stop them?”

“I suppose it would depend on whether they cut me a part of the profit.”

She shook her head. “Jem is your parabatai,” she said. “He is your brother, given to you by the Clave, but I am your sister by blood. Why would you do anything for him, but you only want me to go home?”

“How do you know the drugs are for Jem?” Will said.

“I’m not an idiot, Will.”

“No, more’s the pity. Jem- Jem is like the better part of me. I would not expect you to understand. I owe him. I owe him this.”

“So what am I?” Cecily said.

Will exhaled, too desperate to check himself. “You are my weakness.”

“And Tessa is your heart,” she said, not angrily, but thoughtfully. “I am not fooled. As I told you, I’m not an idiot. And more’s the pity for you, although I suppose we all want things we can’t have.”

“Oh,” said Will, “and what do you want?”

“I want you to come home.” A strand of black hair was stuck to her cheek by the dampness, and Will fought the urge to pull her cloak closer about her, to make her safe as he had when she was a child.

“The Institute is my home,” Will sighed, and leaned his head against the stone wall. “I can’t stand out her arguing with you all evening, Cecily. If you’re determined to follow me into hell, I can’t stop you.”

“Finally,” she said provingly. “You’ve seen sense. I knew you would, you’re related to me.”

Will fought the urge to shake her.

“Are you ready?”

She nodded, and he raised his hand to knock on the door.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“I take your hand, brother, so that you may go in peace.
Will had opened his blue eyes that never lost their colour over all the passing years, and looked at Jem and then Tessa, and smiled, and died, with Tessa's head on his shoulder and and his hand in Jem's.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“He was Will, in all his perfect imperfection; Will, whose heart was as easy to break as it was carefully guarded; Will, who loved not wisely but entirely and with everything he had.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“You may be right. I think it was round about Christmas when I got my Welsh dragon tattoo.”
At that, Tessa had to try very hard not to blush. “How did that happen?”
Will made an airy gesture with his hand. “I was drunk…”
“Nonsense. You were never really drunk.”
“On the contrary—in order to learn how to pretend to be inebriated, once must become inebriated at least once, as a reference point. Six-Fingered Nigel had been at the mulled cider—“
“You can’t mean there’s truly a Six-Fingered Nigel?”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“Oh, do you have A Tale of Two Cities?"
"That silly thing? Men going around getting their heads chopped off for love? Ridiculus." Will unpeeled himself from the door and made his way toward Tessa where she stood by the bookshelves. He gestured expansively at the vast number of volumes all around him. "No, here you'll find all sorts of advice about how to chop off someone else's head if you need to; much more useful.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“Will's face turned grave. "Be careful with it, though. It's six hundred years old and the only copy of its kind. Losing or damaging it is punishable by death under the Law."
Tessa thrust the book away from her as if it were on fire. "You can't be serious."
"You're right. I'm not." Will leapt down from the ladder and landed lightly in front of her. "You do believe everything I say, though, don't you? Do I seem unusually trustworthy to you, or are you just a naive sort?”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“And the gold of her ruined wedding dress.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“No, i mean enterprising." said Will. "When I mean morally deficient, I say,`Now, that is something i would have done´”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“They're still looking at him," she said to Magnus under her breath. "At Will, I mean."

"Of course they are," said Magnus. His eyes reflected light like a cat's as they surveyed the room. "Look at him. The face of a bad angel and eyes like the night sky in Hell. He's very pretty, and vampires like that. I can't say I mind either." Magnus grinned. "Black hair and blue eyes are my favorite combination."

Tessa reached up to pat Camille's pale blond curls.

Magnus shrugged. "Nobody's perfect.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“I'm trying to figure out how someone could live in a brothel for a month and not notice. You must be terribly dull-witted."
Tessa glared.
"If it helps at all, it seemed to be quite a high-class establishment. Nicely furnished, fairly clean..."
"Sounds as if you've visited your fair share of brothels," Tessa said, sourly. "Making a study of them?"
"More of a hobby," said Will, and smiled like a bad angel.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“There will always be those who want to tell you who you are based on your name or the blood in your veins. Do not let other people decide who you are. Decide for yourself.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire

“Will." Her hands pulled at his shirt, and it came away, the buttons tearing, his head shaking free of the fabric, all wild dark hair, Heathcliff on the moors. His hands were less sure on her dress, but it came away as well, off over her head, and was cast aside, leaving Tessa in her chemise and corset. She went motionless, shocked at being so undressed in front of anyone but Sophie, and Will took a wild look at her corset that was only part desire.
“How—," he said. “Does it come off?"
Tessa couldn't help herself; despite everything, she giggled. “It laces," she whispered. “In the back.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“No, the last thing she cared about was whether people were staring at the boy and girl kissing by the river, as London, it's cities and towers and churches and bridges and streets, circled all about them like the memory of a dream. And if the Thames that ran beside them, sure and silver in the afternoon light, recalled a night long ago when the moon shone as brightly as a shilling on this same boy and girl, or if the stones of Blackfriars knew the tread of their feet and thought to themselves: At last, the wheel comes to a full circle, they kept their silence.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“The witchlight made his skin paler, his eyes more intently blue. They were the color of the water in the North Atlantic, where the ice drifted on its blue-black surface like the snow clinging to the dark glass pane of a window.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“He opened his mouth. The words were there. He was about to say them when a jolt of terror went through him, the terror of someone who, wandering in a mist, pauses only to realise that they have stopped inches from the edge of a gaping abyss. The way she was looking at him - she could read what was in his eyes, he realised. It must have been written plainly there, like words on the page of a book. There had been no time, no chance, to hide it.

“Will,” she whispered. “Say something, Will.”

But there was nothing to say. There was only emptiness, as there had been before her. As there would always be.

'I have lost everything', Will thought. 'Everything.”
― Cassandra Clare

“As the carriage whipped forward, they passed the alley she had spent so many days staring at—it was there, and then gone as they careened around a corner, nearly knocking over a costermonger pushing a donkey cart piled high with new potatoes. Tessa screamed.

Will reached past her and yanked the curtain shut. "It's better if you don't look," he told her pleasantly.

"He's going to kill someone. Or get us killed."

"No, he won't. Thomas is an excellent driver."

Tessa glared at him. "Clearly the word excellent means something else on this side of the Atlantic.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“Marry me," he said. "Marry me, Tess. Marry me and be Tessa Herondale. Or be Tessa Gray, or be whatever you wish to call yourself, but marry me and stay with me and never leave me, for I cannot bear another day of my life to go by that does not have you in it.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“Tess?” A soft voice at the door; she looked up and saw Will there, silhouetted in the light from the corridor.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“I've mastered many thing's in my life. Navigating the streets of London, dancing the quadrille, the Japanese art of flower arranging, lying at charades, concealing a highly intoxicated state, delighting young women with my charms..."
Tessa stared.
"Alas," he went on, "no one has ever actually referred to me as 'the master' or 'the magister', either. More's the pity..."
"Are you highly intoxicated at the moment?”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“It is the mundanes who look at me and see something they do not understand—a boy who is not quite white and not quite foreign either."
"Just as I am not human, and not demon either," Tessa said softly.
His eyes softened. "You are human," he said. "Never think you are not. I have seen you with your brother; I know how you care for him. If you can feel hope, guilt, sorrow, love—then you are human.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs; and when he was done, and he'd set the violin back in its box, Will's eyes were closed, but Tessa's were full of tears.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“The most interesting women are always the most whispered about.”
― Cassandra Clare, Chain of Gold

“Your place is with me,” Jem said. “It always will be.”
“What do you mean?”
He flushed, the color dark against his pale skin. “I mean,” he said, “Tessa Gray, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”
Tessa sat bolt upright. “Jem!”
They stared at each other for a moment. At last he said, trying for lightness, though his voice cracked, “That was not a no, I suppose, though
neither was it a yes.”
“You can’t mean it.”
“I do mean it.”
“You can’t—I’m not a Shadowhunter. They’ll expel you from the Clave—”
He took a step closer to her, his eyes eager. “You may not be precisely a Shadowhunter. But you are not a mundane either, nor provably a
Downworlder. Your situation is unique, so I do not know what the Clave will do. But they cannot forbid something that is not forbidden by the Law.
They will have to take your—our—individual case into consideration, and that could take months. In the meantime they cannot prevent our
engagement.”
“You are serious.” Her mouth was dry. “Jem, such a kindness on your part is indeed incredible. It does you credit. But I cannot let you sacrifice
yourself in that way for me.”
“Sacrifice? Tessa, I love you. I want to marry you.”
― Cassandra Clare

“Will,” she whispered against his mouth. She wanted him closer to her so badly, it was like an ache, a painful hot ache that spread from her stomach to speed her heart and knot her hands in his hair and set her skin burning. “Will, you need not be so careful. I will not break.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince