“She would take him to faraway lands to observe foreign ways, so he could get closer to the strangeness within himself.”

“Sometimes when she looks at him that way he finds himself almost blushing; a feeling so strange he almost doesn’t recognize it. Jace Wayland doesn’t blush.”

“Wherever it's good, whatever strange, faraway land, let's go there, let's stay in that place alone.”

“I'd Begin to imagine my life in a foreign country, some faraway land where, if things went wrong, i could always blame somebody else, saying I'd never wanted to live there in the first place.”

“So he explored, explored within himself, scanning himself with a lamp, as if it were not himself at all but some strange monster that he had been commanded to guard.”

“What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans wass that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that hed been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood.”