Bianca

“I was thinking about the first time I ever saw you," he said, "and how after that I couldn't forget you. I wanted to, but I couldn't stop myself. I forced Hodge to let me be the one who came to find you and bring you back to the Institue. And even back then, in that stupid coffee shop, when I saw you sitting on that couch with Simon, even then that felt wrong to me-- I should have been the one sitting with you. The one who made you laugh like that. I couldn't get rid of that feeling. That it should have been me. And the more I knew you, the more I felt it--it had never been like that for me before. I'd always wanted a girl and then gotten to know her and not wanted her anymore, but with you the feeling just got stronger and stronger until that night when you showed up at Renwick's and I knew.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Glass

“All the same,' said the Scarecrow, 'I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one.'
I shall take the heart,' returned the Tin Woodman, 'for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.”
― L. Frank Baum, Oz: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost."
So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions."
An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words.”
― Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned