Cassandra Rose Clarke

“What kinda vows?" Celibacy? I thought, though I didn't say it. Nobody keeps a celibacy vow anyway.”

“Well, look who's on my front porch," he said, speaking Empire with this odd hissing accent. "A murderer and a cross-dressing pirate."I looked down at my clothes, ripped and shredded and covered in mud and sand and dried blood. I'd forgotten I was dressed like a boy."So are you here to kill me or to rob me?" the man said. "I generally don't find it useful to glow when undertaking acts of subterfuge, but then, I'm just a wizard”

“She’d never encountered any stories as intricate or compelling as the stories he gave her, nor anything that made her sigh when she read it. She liked best the stories about people becoming other things. Stories where women became swans or echoes. In the evenings, when Finn disappeared into the mysterious recesses of the laboratory, Cat went out to the garden or down to the river and wondered what it would be like to be a stream of water, a cypress tree, a star burning a million miles away.”

“There is nothing else like me in the entire world, said Finn. "That's what you wrote. I'm the only one. I can't tell you what it means to be the only one of my kind," he said. "I can't...There is a lack in myself. But your thesis almost filled it in. It was...a start.”

“I'd handed my heart over to him, a damned blood magic assassin, without even realizing it.”

“You don't realize how much you miss something till it comes back to you, and then you wonder how you went so long without it.”

“She moved like water, graceful and soft and lovely. Every part of me wanted to stick out my foot and trip her, just to see her stumble.”

“I can't believe this," I muttered, cradling the skein of water up close to my chest. "Two weeks in the desert all on account of some assassin who doesn't know how to look out for snakes."    "If you hadn't killed that snake," Naji said calmly, "I would have killed you." " Oh, shut up.”