Jordan Hennessy Quotes

“By the time we’re married,” Declan said eventually, “I want you to have applied for a different studio in this place because this man’s paintings are very ugly.”

Her pulse gently skipped two beats before continuing on as before. “I don’t have a social security number of my own, Pozzi.”

“I’ll buy you one,” Declan said. “You can wear it in place of a ring.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“Why do you only paint what other people have already painted? Declan Lynch had asked. Because her brush had already come pre-loaded with someone else's palette.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Call Down the Hawk

“It’s bonkers, really,” Jordan remarked. “The whole thing. A sweetmetal. Everyone’s going mad trying to get one, they’re so rare, it’s impossible. And here I am, thinking, oh, right, well, I’ll just make one, then. I never thought of myself as an egotist, but I really must have quite a pair on me.”

Declan smiled at this, turning his face away as he did, as always. “I’m just surprised you’ve never considered yourself an egotist.”

“That’s very sweet.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“Balls,” Ronan hissed, annoyed to have been startled.

“Tits,” added Hennessy.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“Hennessy leaned over one of the shelves. The tediously normal-looking cell phone on it brightened to display a photograph of two young men as the lock screen. One was Ronan, laughing explosively. The other was a rather self-​contained-looking fellow, striking in an unusual sort of way, smirking a bit at whatever he’d just said. They were not exactly opposites but their appearances nonetheless gave the impression they were. Ronan’s dark, dramatic eyebrows, the other guy’s light, barely visible ones. Ronan’s emotions screamed upon his face while the other guy’s whispered.
“Is that him?”

Ronan addressed the dream at large. “Traitor. You didn’t have to show her.”

“He doesn’t look like he’s filling a hole inside himself with your toxic presence,” Hennessy said. She kind of hated looking at them together. It made her feel ugly inside. “Are you guys in love five-​ever or do you think you’re a pretty board game to pass his time?”

Now she sounded ugly, too.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“Ah, there it was. It took no effort to remember the way he’d looked at her the first moment he realized she was a dream.

“I’m a dream,” Jordan said. “I’m not your dream.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“Ronan Lynch was becoming a jagged, shaggy horror of a thing. She could feel the same wordless dread that the Lace invoked rising in her.

Hennessy hugged him.

She didn't even know where the impulse came from. She was not a sentimental hugger. She had not been hugged as a child, unless the hug was being emotionally weaponized for later. And Ronan Lynch did not seem like the sort of person who would care about getting a hug. Giving someone care and receiving it were two unrelated actions.

At first it did not seem to do anything.

Ronan kept screaming. The hug had not made him appear more human. He seemed more like Bryde than ever--and not Bryde when he was his most man-shaped. He just seemed like a dream entity that hated everything.

"Ronan Lynch, you asshole," Hennessy said.

Once, he'd hugged her. At the time, she had thought it didn't help, but she'd been wrong.

So she held on now, and kept holding on, though he became even less recognizable as Ronan Lynch for a little bit. Then, after a while, the scream gave way to quiet.

She could feel his body quivering. Like a pencil sketch, it conveyed misery with the smallest of gestures.

And then there was nothing at all, just stillness.

Finally, she realized he was hugging her, too, tightly.

There was a strange sort of magic to being a person holding another person after not being held by someone for a long time. There was another strange sort of magic to understand you'd been using words and silence the wrong way for a long time.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“A special kind of relationship happened between an artist and a piece of art, on account of the investment. Sometimes it was an emotional investment. The subject matter meant something to the artist, making every stroke of the brush weightier than it looked. It might be a technical investment. It was a new method, a hard angle, an artistic challenge that meant no success on the canvas could be taken for granted. And sometimes it was simply the sheer investment of time. Art took hours, days, weeks, years, of single-minded focus. This investment meant that everything that touched the art-making experience got absorbed. Music, conversations, or television shows experienced during the making became part of the piece, too. Hours, days, weeks, years later, the memory of one could instantly invoke the memory of the other, because they had been inextricably joined.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“Tyrian Purple. A historical pigment, nearly impossible to get. It was made from excreted dye of sea snails such as the Purpura lapillus. Snails were ill-motivated pigment makers; it took an enornous number of them to produce even a small amount of Tyrian purple.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Call Down the Hawk

“As they stepped in, everyone in the restaurant stared. Six diners. Two standing in line at the counter. One at the pickup area. A cashier. Probably another few employees in the back. Witnesses, that was what they called them, people who would remember a Black girl in a crochet crop top and leather, a dude with a shaved head and a raven now back on his shoulder, and a hawk-nosed man with an expression that suggested he’d never felt fear in his life. This was why they never stopped at restaurants.

Hennessy held out her hands grandly. “This is a stickup.”

Bryde sighed heavily”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“Slowly, Ronan Lynch sputtered to movement, trying to sit up even before his body was fully willing, scrambling, his voice disbelieving: "Adam?"

Adam, who had been sitting quietly all this time beside Ronan, grinned weakly as Ronan seized him around the neck in a crushing, desperate hug. Hennessy and Jordan watched the two of them kneeling in the grass, just clinging to each other. It was an enormous, extraordinary moment, surrounded by mundane, ordinary things.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“Ronan's trying to wake up the world. I'm trying to think of how to talk him out of it, but what he's talking about is a world where she never fell asleep. A world where Matthew's just a kid. A world where it doesn't matter what Hennessy does, if something happens to her. A level playing field. I don't think it's a good idea, but it's not like I can't see the appeal, because now I'm biased, I'm too biased to be clear." Declan shook his head a little. "I said I would never become my father, anything like him. And now look at me. At us."

Ah, there it was.

It took no effort to remember the way he'd looked at her the first moment he realized she was a dream.

"I'm a dream," Jordan said. "I'm not your dream."

Declan put his chin in his hand and looked back out the window; that, too, would be a good portrait. Perhaps it was just because she liked looking at him that she thought each pose would make a good one. A series. What a future that idea promised, nights upon nights like this, him sitting there, her standing here.

"By the time we're married," Declan said eventually, "I want you to have applied for a different studio in this place because this man's paintings are very ugly."

Her pulse gently skipped two beats before continuing on as before. "I don't have a social security number of my own, Pozzi."

"I'll buy you one," Declan said. "You can wear it in place of a ring."

The two of them looked at each other past the canvas on her easel.

Finally, he said, voice soft, "I should see the painting now."

"Are you sure?"

"It's time, Jordan."

Putting his jacket to the side, he stood. He waited. He would not come around to look without an invite.

It's time, Jordan.

Jordan had never been truly honest with anyone who didn't wear Hennessy's face. Showing him this painting, this original, felt like being more honest than she had ever been in her life.

She stepped back to give him room.

Declan took it in. His eyes flickered to and from the likeness, from the jacket on Portrait Declan's leg to the real jacket he'd left behind on the chair. She watched his gaze follow the line edge she had taken such care to paint, that subtle electricity of complementary colors at the edge of his form.

"It's very good," Declan muttered. "Jordan, it's very good."

"I thought it might be."

"I don't know if it's a sweetmetal. But you're very good."

"I thought I might be."

"The next one will be even better."

"I think it might be."

"And in ten years your scandalous masterpiece will get you thrown out of France, too," he said. "And later you can triumphantly sell it to the Met. Children will write papers about you. People like me will tell stories about you to their dates at museums to make them think they're interesting."

She kissed him. He kissed her. And this kiss, too, got all wrapped up in the art-making of the portrait sitting on the easel beside them, getting all mixed in with all the other sights and sounds and feelings that had become part of the process.

It was very good.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“Jordan Hennessy.
He thought about her all the time.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“Declan Lynch knew he was boring.

He'd worked very hard to be that way, after all. It was a magic trick he didn't expect any prize from but survival, even as he looked at other lives and imagined them his. He didn't fool himself. He knew what he was allowed to do and to want and to put in his life.

Jordan Hennessy didn't belong.

But still, when he came back from the National Gallery of Art to his empty town house, he closed the door behind him and for a moment he just leaned against it, eyes closed, pretending--no, not even pretending. He just didn't think. For one second of one minute of the day, he didn't run the probabilities and worst-case scenarios and possibilities and consequences. For one second of one minute of the day, he just let himself feel.

There it was:

Happiness.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Call Down the Hawk

“Hennessy?" Ronan said, in a slightly different voice.

"Lynch."

"I've been alone a long time," he said.

Part of her thought he hadn't, though. His brothers, his boyfriend, his friends who called him with information in the middle of the night.

But the bigger part of her understood it, because she'd been alone, too. Because at the end of the day, no one else could fathom what it was like living with these endless possibilities inside your head.

Hennessy had come tonight thinking she didn't want Jordan to sleep forever if this failed.

But now she knew this, too: She didn't want to die, either.

She reached between them and fumbled until she felt his leather wristbands, then found his hand. She held it. He held back tightly.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Call Down the Hawk

“Ronan was in hell.

He was dreaming.

The Lace was everywhere; it was the entire dream. It was wrong to say it surrounded him, because that would imply that he still existed, and he wasn't sure of that. The dream was the Lace. He was the Lace.

It was hell.

It was the dreamt security system.

It was Adam's scream.

It was his last forest dying.

It was his father's battered body.

It was his mother's grave.

It was his friends leaving in Gansey's old Camaro for a year's trip without him.

It was Adam sitting with him in the labyrinth in Harvard telling him that it was never going to work.

It was tamquam, marked unread.

It would kill him, too, it said. You have nothing but yourself and what is that?

But then there was a furious flash of light, and in it, he felt a burst of hope.

He was part of something bigger.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Call Down the Hawk

“Slowly, Ronan Lynch sputtered to movement, trying to sit up even before his body was fully willing, scrambling, his voice disbelieving: "Adam?"

Adam, who had been sitting quietly all this time beside Ronan, grinned weakly as Ronan seized him around the neck in a crushing, desperate hug. Hennessy and Jordan watched the two of them kneeling in the grass, just clinging to each other. It was an enormous, extraordinary moment, surrounded by mundane ordinary things.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“Declan had a feeling like there was a version of himself that might never take another step off this sidewalk. That might just stand here forever until his heart stopped beating, however long that took.

But instead he squared his shoulders. He took a breath. He felt empty.

He texted Jordan: you were the story I chose for myself.

Then he walked back into the hotel.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“Ronan Lynch was becoming a jagged, shaggy horror of a thing. She could feel the same wordless dread that the Lace invoked rising in her.

Hennessy hugged him.

She didn't even know where the impulse came from. She was not a sentimental hugger. She had not been hugged as a child, unless the hug was being emotionally weaponized for later. And Ronan Lynch did not seem like the sort of person who would care about getting a hug. Giving someone care and receiving it were two unrelated actions.

At first it did not seem to do anything.

Ronan kept screaming. The hug had not made him appear more human. He seemed more like Bryde than ever--and not Bryde when he was his most man-shaped. He just seemed like a dream entity that hated everything.

"Ronan Lynch, you asshole," Hennessy said.

Once, he'd hugged her. At the time, she had thought it didn't help, but she'd been wrong.

So she held on now, and kept holding on, though he became even less recognizable as Ronan Lynch for a little bit. Then, after a while, the scream gave way to quiet.

She could feel his body quivering. Like a pencil sketch, it conveyed misery with the smallest of gestures.

And then there was nothing at all, just stillness.

Finally, she realized he was hugging her, too, tightly.

There was a strange sort of magic to being a person holding another person after not being held by someone for a long time. There was another strange sort of magic to understanding you'd been using words and silence the wrong way for a long time.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“He felt a bright humming energy all through him, something he hadn't felt in a very long time. His stomach was a ruin. His life in black and white; this moment in color.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Call Down the Hawk