Maggie Stiefvater

Adam's response was buried in the sound of the first-story door falling open. Noah slouched in. In a wounded tone, he said, "He threw me out the window!"Ronan's voice sang out from behind his closed door: "You're already dead!

Don't panic. Are you sitting? You probably don't need to sit. Well, possibly. At least lean on something.

Sensitive," I tried.Sam translated: "Squishy.""Creative.""Dangerously emo.""Thoughtful.""Feng shui." out of 'thoughtful'?""You know, because in feng shui, you arrange furniture and plants and stuff in thoughtful ways." Sam shrugged. "To make you calm. Zenlike. Or something. I'm not one hundred percent sure how it all works, besides the thoughtful part.

Grace, who haunted my thoughts when I couldn__ dream

His home was populated by things and creatures from Niall Lynch's dreams, and his mother was just another one of them

Fate," Blue replied, glowering at her mother, "is a very weighty word to throw around before breakfast.

The hard fact of friendship is that you need to make time for new friends by first stripping out the people who are using your energy in an unsatisfying way. You have to take that risk of being friendless to make room in your life for others who will be your new best friends

People shouldn't have to earn kindness. They should have to earn cruelty.

Images barraged him. Connections darted electric. Veins. Roots. Forked lightning. Tributaries. Branches. Vines snaked around trees, herds of animals, drops of water running tog

I pressed my hand against her hair, holding her to me, filled with the certainty that she was going to hurt me again and that I didn't have the strength to push her away before she did.

Pain was a torn piece of paper.

We have to be back in three hours," Ronan said. "I just fed Chainsaw but she'll need it again.""This," Gansey replied "is precisely why I didn't want to have a baby with you.

Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn't all-encompassing, that wasn't blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she'd had this kind, she didn't want another.

Was it okay? Adam had turned down so many offers of help from Gansey. Money for school, money for food, money for rent. Pity and charity, Adam had thought. For so long, he'd wanted Gansey to see him as an equal, but it was possible that all this time, the only person who needed to see that was Adam. Now he could see that it wasn't charity Gansey was offering. It was just truth. And something else: friendship of the unshakable kind. Friendship you could swear on. That could be busted nearly to breaking and come back stronger than before.

To think you could have been dreaming the cure for cancer," Blue said. "Look, Sargent," Ronan retorted, "I was gonna dream you some eye cream last night since clearly modern medicine's doing jack shit for you, but I nearly had my ass handed to me by a death snake from the fourth circle of dream hell, so you're welcome."Blue was appropriately touched. "Ah, thanks, man.""No problem, bro.

I built an idea in my head of the hero I wanted to be, a grab bag of traits from heroes, villains, and side characters. I did not have book role models, I had book blueprints.But there remained a huge gap between the person I wanted to be and the person who I was. This was because no matter how many book blueprints I had, as much as I wanted to make myself the hero of my own life, it didn__ matter as long as I kept telling the story wrong.Nowadays, as a storyteller, I know what the problem was. I had all the elements I needed to tell a good story. But I was telling it the wrong way, so I could never get to the ending I wanted.If you tell yourself you__e a winner, you know what kind of story you__e telling, and you will march toward that... Likewise, if you tell yourself you__e a loser, you__e made that your story, and you will march toward that instead. The same setbacks could happen in the loser__ story as in the winner__ story, but the self-defined loser would let them be proof that they were never going to be anything.Here__ the story I was telling myself back when I was little edible child waiting to be carried away by hawks and making OCD rituals for herself: once upon a time, there was a girl who was afraid of everything. When I was 16, I realized that I knew what this story looked like and how it ended, and it wasn__ the life I wanted for myself. If I wanted my ending to look different, I needed to change the kind of story I was telling about myself. I needed to shape my events into a different genre: once upon a time, there was a woman who was afraid of nothing. At age 16, I legally changed my name from my birthname _ Heidi _ to one I thought sounded like the hero I wanted to be: Maggie. And I vowed that I would never be afraid of anything ever again.Did it work? No, of course not. Not right away. But it became a mission statement, my hero__ journey.

I wish you could be kissed, Jane,' he said. 'Because I would beg just one off you. Under all this.' He flailed an arm toward the stars.

Instead, though, as he drew nearer, his mind kept drifting back to Gansey's voice in the cave the day before. The tremulous note in it. The fear - a fear so profound that Gansey could not bring himself to climb out of the pit, though there was nothing physically preventing him. He had not known that Richard Gansey III had it in him to be a coward.Adam remembered crouching on the kitchen floor of his parents' double-wide, telling himself to take Gansey's oft-repeated advice to leave. "Just put what you need in the car, Adam."But he had stayed. Hung in the pit of his father's anger. A coward, too.Adam felt like he needed to reconfigure every conversation he'd ever had with Gansey in light of this new knowledge.