Verity

“Excelsior," Gansey said bleakly.
Blue asked, "What does that even mean?"
Gansey looked over his shoulder at her. He was once more, just a little bit closer to the boy she'd seen in the churchyard.
"Onward and upward.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“A secret is a strange thing.

There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid.

And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it.

Sometimes, some rare times, a secret stays undiscovered because it is something too big for the mind to hold. It is too strange, too vast, too terrifying to contemplate.

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.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“It was a cruel trick of the universe, thought August, that he only felt human after doing something monstrous.”
― Victoria Schwab, This Savage Song

“If you wanted to, Safiya, you could bend and shape the world.”
― Susan Dennard, Truthwitch