The Dreamer Trilogy Quotes

“Neither Ronan nor Adam had been trained in the difficult and nuanced art of having a future. They had only ever learned the art of surviving the past.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“Introductory paragraph incorporating the thesis: After a challenging childhood marked by adversity, Adam Parrish has become a successful freshman at Harvard University. In the past, he had spent his time doubting himself, fearing he would become like his father, obsessing that others could see his trailer-park roots, and idealizing wealth, but now he has built a new future where no one has to know where he's come from. Before becoming a self-actualized young man at Harvard, Adam had been deeply fascinated by the concept of the ley lines and also supernaturally entangled with one of the uncanny forests located along one, but he has now focused on the real world, using only the ghost of magic to fleece other students with parlor trick tarot card readings. He hasn't felt like himself for months, but he is going to be just fine.

Followed by three paragraphs with information that supports the thesis. First: Adam understands that suffering is often transient, even when it feels permanent. This too shall pass, etc. Although college seems like a lifetime, it is only four years. Four years is only a lifetime if one is a guinea pig.

Second paragraph, building on the first point: Magic has not always been good for Adam. During high school, he frequently immersed himself in it as a form of avoidance. Deep down, he fears that he is prone to it as his father is prone to abuse, and that it will eventually make him unsuitable for society. By depriving himself of magic, he forces himself to become someone valuable to the unmagic world, i.e. the Crying Club.

Third paragraph, with the most persuasive point: Harvard is a place Ronan Lynch cannot be, because he cannot survive there, either physically or socially. Without such hard barriers, Adam will surely continue to return to Ronan Lynch again and again, and thus fall back in with bad habits. He will never achieve the life of financial security and recognition he planned.

Thesis restated, bringing together all the information to prove it: Although life is unbearable now, and Adam Parrish seems to have lost everything important to him in the present by pursuing the things important to him in the past, he will be fine.

Concluding paragraph describing what the reader just learned and why it is important for them to have learned it: He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“Adam Parrish.

This was how it had begun: Ronan Lynch had been in the passenger seat of Richard Campbell Gansey III's bright orange '73 Camaro, hanging out the window because walls couldn't hold him. Little historic Henrietta, Virginia, curled close, trees and streetlights alike leaning in as if to catch the conversation down below. What a pair the two of them were. Gansey, searching desperately for meaning. Ronan, sure that he wouldn't find any. Voted most and least likely to succeed, respectively, at Aglionby Academy, their shared high school. Those days, Gansey was the hunter and Ronan the hawkish best friend kept hooded and belled to prevent him tearing himself to shreds with his own talons.

This was how it had begun: a student walking his bike up the last hill into town, clearly headed the same place they were. He wore the Aglionby uniform, although as they grew closer Ronan saw it was threadbare in a way school uniforms couldnt manage in a single year's use--secondhand. His sleeves were pushed up and his forearms were wiry, the thin muscles picked out in stark relief. Ronan's attention stuck on his hands. Lovely boyish hands with prominent knuckles, gaunt and long like his unfamiliar face.

"Who's that?" Gansey had asked, and Ronan hadn't answered, just kept hanging out the window. As they passed, Adam's expression was all contradictions: intense and wary, resigned and resilient, defeated and defiant.

Ronan hadn't known anything about who Adam was then and, if possible, he'd known even less about who he himself was, but as they drove away from the boy with the bicycle, this was how it had begun: Ronan leaning back against his seat and closing his eyes and sending up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to God:

Please.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Call Down the Hawk

“The second thing he noticed was the rat. He'd had a long debate with Matthew about rats, back at the DC town house they'd shared a lifetime ago, because Matthew had wanted one. As a pet. Declan had said Matthew wouldn't want one if he'd seen a city rat. Matthew had replied the only thing that was different about a city rat was that no one loved it.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“He and Matthew would be talking about something entirely different and then suddenly Bryde would break off and be all "consciousness is a map to every place we have ever been and will be and yet no one here will consult it and thus is lost" and Matthew would ask, "Have you ever read anything about clinical depression?”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“A startlingly clear memory jolted through Ronan, as fresh as the moment he'd lived it. It was the day Ronan had first come to Harvard to surprise Adam, back when he still thought he was moving to Cambridge. He'd been so full of anticipation for how the reveal would go and then, in the end, they'd walked right past each other.

At the time, Ronan had thought it was because Adam looked so different after his time away. He was dressed differently. He held himself differently. He'd even lost his accent. And he'd assumed it had felt the same to Adam; Ronan had gotten older, lonelier, sharper.

But now they were in this strange sea, and neither of them looked anything like the Adam Parrish and Ronan Lynch the other had known. Adam was a collection of thoughts barely masquerading as a human form. Ronan Lynch was raw dark energy, alien and enormous.

And yet when Adam's consciousness touched his, Ronan recognized him. It was Adam's footsteps on the stairs. His surprised whoop as he catapulted into the pond they'd dug. The irritation in his voice; the impatience of his kiss; his ruthless, dry sense of humor; his biting pride; his ferocious loyalty. It was all caught up in this essential form that had nothing to do with how his physical body looked.

The difference between this reunion and the one at Harvard was that there in Cambridge they had been false. They'd both been wearing masks upon masks, hiding the truth of themselves from everyone, including themselves. Here, there was no way to hide. They were only their thoughts. Only the truth.

"Ronan, Ronan, it is you. I did it. I found you. With just a sweetmetal, I found you."

Ronan didn't know if Adam had thought it or said it, but it didn't matter. The joy was unmistakable.

"Tamquam," said Ronan, and Adam said, "Alter idem."

Cicero had written the phrase about Atticus, his dearest friend. Qui est tamquam alter idem. Like a second self.

Ronan and Adam could not hug, because they had no real arms, but it didn't matter. Their energy darted and mingled and circled, the brilliant bright of the sweetmetals and the absolute dark of the Lace. They didn't speak, but they didn't have to. Audible words were redundant when their thoughts were tangled together as one. Without any of the clumsiness of language, they shared their euphoria and their lurking fears. They rehashed what they had done to each other and apologized. They showed everything they had done and that had been done to them in the time since they'd last seen each other--the good and the bad, the horrid and the wonderful. Everything had felt so murky for so long, but when they were like this, all that was left was clarity. Again and again they spiraled around and through one another, not Ronan-and-Adam but rather one entity that held both of them. They were happy and sad, angry and forgiven, they were wanted, they were wanted, they were wanted.”
― 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 understand you'd been using words and silence the wrong way for a long time.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“On the seventh day, the Lynch brothers discovered they were friends once more.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“How badly Declan wanted it. How badly he wanted to trust that someone else would make sure the world didn't burn down without him. How badly he wanted to be a son again, a kid again, to let someone else carry this. Carry him.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“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 didn't care to think about this. It gave him the same vibe he used to get back at the Barns some nights, when he got trapped in one particular train of thought, where he imagined he and Adam had been together a very long time and then Ronan died of old age or bad choices and Adam found someone else and later they all three died and were reunited in the afterlife, and rather than getting to spend the rest of eternity together, Adam had to split his time between Ronan and this stupid usurper he'd fallen in love with as a widower, which completely ruined the point of Heaven. And that was before Ronan even got to worrying if Adam made it to the afterlife at all, with his agnostic tendencies.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“The very first dram Ronan had ever been truly proud of, truly euphoric over, had been a copy.

It had been in high school. Ronan wasn't good at surviving high school and he wasn't good at surviving friendship, and so while his friend Gansey's back was turned, he'd stolen Gansey's car. It was a beautiful car. A 1973 bright orange Camaro with stripes right up its hood and straight down its ass. Ronan had wanted to drive it for months, despite Gansey forbidding it.

Maybe because of him forbidding it.

Within hours of stealing it, Ronan had totaled it.

Gansey hadn't wanted him to drive it because he thought he'd grind the clutch, or curb it, or burn out the tires, or maybe, maybe blow the engine.

And here Ronan had totaled it.

Ronan had loved Richard C. Gansey III far more than he loved himself at that point, and he hadn't known how he was ever going to face him when he returned from out of town.

And then, Joseph Kavinsky had taught him to dream a copy.

Before that, all of Ronan's dreams--that he knew about, Matthew didn't count--had been accidents and knickknacks, the bizarre and the useless. When he'd successfully copied a car, an entire car, he'd been out of his mind with glee. The dreamt car had been perfect down to the last detail. Exactly like the original. The pinnacle of dreaming.

Now a copy was the least impressive thing to him. He could copy anything he put his mind to. That just made him a very ethereal photocopier. A one-man 3-D printer.

The dreams he was proud of now were the dreams that were originals. Dreams that couldn't exist in any other way. Dreams that took full advantage of the impossibility of dreamspace in a way that was cunning or lovely or effective or all of the above. The sundogs. Lindenmere. Dreams that had to be dreams.

In the past, all his good dreams like this were gifts from Lindenmere or accidents rather than things he had consciously constructed. He was beginning to realize, after listening to Bryde, that this was because he'd been thinking too small. His consciousness was slowly becoming the shape of the concrete, waking world, and it was shrinking all his dreams to the probable. He needed to start realizing that possible and impossible didn't mean the same thing for him as they did for other people. He needed to break himself of the habit of rules, of doubts, of physics. His "what if" had grown so tame.

"You are made of dreams and this world is not for you."

He would not let the nightwash take him and Matthew.

He would not let this world kill him slowly.

He deserved a place here, too.

He woke.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Call Down the Hawk

“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

“As the crowds grew thicker, Matthew reached up for Declan's hand.

It was just like that. There was Aurora on one side, Declan on the other, and Matthew could have chosen either, but he held up his hand for Declan instead. He did not question that Declan would want to keep him secure; he just assumed that he would.

Declan looked down at Matthew. Matthew smiled up.

At that moment Declan understood that Matthew was unlike any of the other Lynches. The rest of Declan's family members were knotted with secrets, memories, lives experienced behind masks. Matthew might have been a dream, but nothing about him was pretend. Matthew was the truth.

Declan took his hand and held it tightly.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“He turned back to Ronan and said, voice quite calm. "You were right. I was wrong. I fucked up. I fucked it all up. Here is the situation. Bryde said I wasn't keeping you from danger, I was keeping you from being dangerous. I don't think--No. I was. That is true. What he said was true. I have been holding you back your entire life because I was afraid. I have been scared shitless every time you fell asleep since I was a kid, and I have been stopping you whenever I can. Not anymore. I am going to New York and I'm going to get a sweetmetal strong enough to wake you up."

Ronan did not move a millimeter, but one of the trails of salt water down his cheek glistened a little as one more tear was added to it.

"Find whoever killed him, Ronan," Declan told him. "Find whoever killed Matthew and make sure they are never happy ever again."

He and his brother never hugged, but Declan put his hand on Ronan's warm skull for a second.

Declan said, "Be dangerous.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“Quite suddenly Ronan was cross with both voices. He was cross with himself. Both sides telling him what he was, and him believing it. How long had he been asking: Tell me what I am?

Never once had he simply decided for himself.

It wasn't a choice at all.

He woke up.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“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

“The music from inside drowned out every other sound. It was the sort of music Ronan heard all the time when he was at Aglionby, the stuff that made him feel as if he truly were nothing like other people, not because he was gay or because his father had been murdered or because he could take things out of his dreams, but because he couldn't bring himself to sing along to the shit other students sang along to. Funny how a handful of people loving a song you couldn't stand could make you feel inhuman.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“Declan had been told a long time ago that he had to know what he wanted, or he'd never get it. Not by his father, because his father would never have delivered such pragmatic advice in such a pragmatic way. No, even if Niall Lynch believed in the sentiment, he would have wrapped it up in a long story filled with metaphor and magic and nonsense riddles. Only years after the storytelling would Declan be sitting somewhere and realize that all along Niall had been trying to teach him to balance his checkbook, or whatever the tale had really been about. Niall could never just say the thing.

No, this piece of advice--You have to know what you want, or you'll never get it--was given to Declan by a senator from Nevada he'd met during a DC field trip back in eighth grade. The other children had been bored by the pale stone restraint of the city and the sameness of the law and government offices they toured. Declan, however, had been fascinated. He'd asked the senator what advice he had for those looking to get into politics.

"Come from money," the senator had said first, and then when all the eighth graders and their teachers had stared without laughing, he added, "You have to know what you want, or you'll never get it. Make goals."

Declan made goals. The goal was DC. The goal was politics. The goal was structure, and more structure, and yet more structure. He took AP classes on political science and policy. When he traveled with his father to black markets, he wrote papers. When he took calls from gangsters and shady antique auction houses, he arranged drop-offs near DC and wrangled meetings with HR people. Aglionby Academy made calls and pulled strings; he got names, numbers, internships. All was going according to plan. His father's will conveniently left him a townhouse adjacent to DC. Declan pressed on. He kept his brothers alive; he graduated; he moved to DC.

He made the goal, he went towards the goal.

When he took his first lunch meeting with his new boss, he found himself filled with the same anticipation he'd had as an eighth grader. This was the place, he thought, where things happened. Just across the road was the Mexican embassy. Behind him was the IMF. GW Law School was a block away. The White House, the USPS, the Red Cross, all within a stone's throw.

This was before he understood there was no making it for him. He came from money, yeah, but the wrong kind of money. Niall Lynch's clout was not relevant in this daylight world; he only had status in the night. And one could not rise above that while remaining invisible to protect one's dangerous brother.

On that first day of work, Declan walked into the Renwick Gallery and stood inside an installation that had taken over the second floor around the grand staircase. Tens of thousands of black threads had been installed at points all along the ceiling, tangling around the Villareal LED sculpture that normally lit the room, snarling the railing over the stairs, blocking out the light from the tall arches that bordered the walls, turning the walkways into dark, confusing rabbit tunnels. Museumgoers had to pick their way through with caution lest they be snared and bring the entire world down with them.

He had, bizarrely, felt tears burning the corners of his eyes.

Before that, he hadn't understood that his goals and what he wanted might not be the same thing.

This was where he'd found art.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“Ronan couldn't do anything. He couldn't do anything at all.

Wake up, Ronan thoughts, wake up, wake up. But his body didn't move a muscle.

Adam gathered up Chainsaw, much to her protests, and tucked her back inside his jacket. He gathered up the lantern.

Tamquam, Ronan thought, furious that Adam was upset, euphoric that he'd come back. It hadn't been that long before this he'd been wanting to know what emotions felt like, and now he had all of them at once.

Just before the door closed behind him, Adam said to the dark, "Alter idem.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“That was when Matthew punched him.

It amazed him, the punch. Not the shape of the blow. Niall had taught all the boys to box when they were much younger, and although Matthew hadn't used this knowledge until then, it turned out his hands and arms and shoulders still remembered it in some deep, subconscious way.

No, what amazed Matthew about the punch was that it appeared at all. The fact that his hand made a fist and the fist took a journey and the journey ended on Declan's face. The punch knocked Declan right off his stool and onto his back on the tile floor, fancy brogues pointing at the ceiling light. It knocked the breath right out of him (Matthew heard it) and it knocked the car keys right out of his pocket (Matthew saw it). A second later, his spilled coffee cup rolled off the counter and joined him on the floor with a clatter.

It amazed Matthew that his hand, right after punching Declan, snatched the car keys off the floor. It was like he was a whole different person. It was like he was Ronan.

"How do you like it?!" Matthew shouted daringly.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“He couldn't find Matthew. He couldn't find Declan. He couldn't find Adam.

He was trapped here.

All this time, he had judged Declan for being so staid as he took extreme measures to keep his brothers safe. But all this time, that was what Ronan should have been doing. He had so much power before the ley line was shut down. He should have been guarding his family, not the other way around. Instead he acted like a petulant kid. He made up the task of guarding the world, which meant nothing to him, instead of guarding his family, which meant everything to him.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“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

“Richard Campbell Gansey III, Ronan's oldest friend, was in the country for the wedding, and so was Blue Sargent. They had just graduated from the same sociology program with two very different concentrations. Both of them were very excited to talk about what they had studied to anyone who would listen, but no one except for each other was very excited to hear about it. Some something trenches something something artifacts something something secret doors something something trees something something primary sources.”
― 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

“Ronan hadn't thought much about the future.

This was a way he and Adam had always been opposites. Adam seemed to only think about the future. He thought about what he wanted to happen days or weeks or years down the road, and then he backfilled actions to make it happen. He was good at depriving himself in the now in order to have something better in the later.

Ronan, on the other hand, couldn't seem to get out of the now. He always remembered consequences too late. After a bloody nose. A broken friendship. A huge tattoo. A cat with human hands. But his head didn't seem built to hold the future. He could imagine it for just a few seconds until, like a weak muscle, his thoughts collapsed back into the present.

But there was one future he could imagine. It was a little bit of a cheat, because it was buried in a memory, and Ronan was better at thinking of the past than the future. It was an indulgent memory, too, one he'd never have copped to out loud. There wasn't much to it. It was from the summer after Adam had graduated, the summer he'd spent with Ronan at the Barns. Ronan had come in from working on the fences outdoors and tossed his work gloves onto the grass-cluttered rug by the mudroom door. As he did, he'd seen that Adam's mechanic gloves were lined up neatly on top of his shoes. Ronan had already known Adam was inside the house, but nonetheless, the image made him pause. They were just gloves, grease-stained and very old. Thrifty Adam always tried to get as much wear out of things as possible. They were long and narrow like Adam himself, and despite their age and stains, they were otherwise impeccably clean. Ronan's work gloves, in comparison, were cruddy and creased and coarse-looking, tossed with carefree abandon, the fingers lassoed over Adam's.

Seeing the two pairs tumbled together, a nameless feeling had suddenly overwhelmed Ronan. It was about Adam's gloves here, but it was also Adam's jacket tossed on the dining room chair, his soda can forgotten on the foyer table, him somewhere tossed with equal comfort in the Barns, his presence commonplace enough that he was not having to perform or engage with Ronan at all times. He was not dating Ronan; he was living in Ronan's life with him.

Shoes kicked off by the door, gloves off.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“And finally, after nearly everyone had gone to bed, Ronan and Adam lay on their backs on one of the roofs and watched the stars get brighter. Without taking his eyes off the sky, Ronan reached out his hand to Adam to offer him something. It was a ring. Without taking his eyes off the sky, Adam took it and put it on.

They sighed. The stars moved overheard. The world felt enormous, both past and future, with their slender present hovering in the middle.

It was all very good.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“Ronan couldn't do anything. He couldn't do anything at all.

Wake up, Ronan thought, wake up, wake up. But his body didn't move a muscle.

Adam gathered up Chainsaw, much to her protests, and tucked her back inside his jacket. He gathered up the lantern.

Tamquam, Ronan thought, furious that Adam was upset, euphoric that he'd come back. It hadn't been that long before this he'd been wanting to know what emotions felt like, and now he had all of them at once.

Just before the door closed behind him, Adam said to the dark, "Alter idem.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren