“She had a stare that stretched to infinity. She was, in that moment, not my mother but something separate from me.”

“But when they couldn’t find Lockie she had to slip back into mother mode. There were days when mother mode pulled her in kicking and screaming. That moment, just for one moment, she had wanted to remain separate. Just herself, whole and untethered.”

“From diapers on, I felt like there was something not good about me, but it was invisible to everybody but my mother. And whenever she looked at me, she had to let me know that she knew. That was her mission in life.”

“I remembered when he'd explained the concept of infinity to me. Immeasurable, one moment stretching out to the next.”

“For a moment Clary thought she might fall; she felt as if something essential had been torn away from her, an arm or a leg, and she stared at Jace in blank astonishment-- what did he feel, did he feel nothing? She didn't think she could bear it if he felt nothing.”

“She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.”