M is for Maggie Stiefvater #AtoZChallenge

Today I’m continuing with the Blogging from A-Z Challenge! I’ll be posting every day except Sundays throughout April. This year, my readers voted for the theme “My Favourite Book Quotes”. So I’ve collected together the quotations that move me, inspire me and make me smile. I hope you enjoy them!

For letter M, I’m focusing on Maggie Stiefvater, another of my auto-buy fantasy authors. I enjoyed the Wolves of Mercy Falls series as a teen, then the Raven Cycle series as a young adult, and more recently I discovered The Scorpio Races. Stiefvater is the queen of characterisation. When I read her novels I feel like I’m having adventures with old friends.

My Favourite Quotes by Maggie Stiefvater

“You’re beautiful and sad,” I said finally, not looking at him when I did. “Just like your eyes. You’re like a song that I heard when I was a little kid but forgot I knew until I heard it again.” For a long moment there was only the whirring sound of the tires on the road, and then Sam said softly, “Thank you.”

“Books are more real when you read them outside.”

“Hope hurt more than the cold.”

“Hello, Grace’s parents. I’m Grace’s boyfriend. Please notice the chaste distance between us. I am very responsible and have never had my tongue in your daughter’s mouth.”

Maggie Stiefvater, Shiver

“Gansey had once told Adam that he was afraid most people didn’t know how to handle Ronan. What he meant by this was that he was worried that one day someone would fall on Ronan and cut themselves.”

“She recognized the strange happiness that came from loving something without knowing why you did, that strange happiness that was sometimes so big that it felt like sadness.”

“As Adam stared at his lap, penitent, he mused that there was something musical about Ronan when he swore, a careful and loving precision to the way he fit the words together, a black-painted poetry. It was far less hateful sounding than when he didn’t swear.”

“Blue tried not to look at Gansey’s boat shoes; she felt better about him as a person if she pretended he wasn’t wearing them.”

“Being Adam Parrish was a complicated thing, a wonder of muscles and organs, synapses and nerves. He was a miracle of moving parts, a study in survival. The most important thing to Adam Parrish, though, had always been free will, the ability to be his own master. This was the important thing. It had always been the important thing. This was what it was to be Adam.”

“More than anything, the journal wanted. It wanted more than it could hold, more than words could describe, more than diagrams could illustrate. Longing burst from the pages, in every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every dark-printed definition. There was something pained and melancholy about it.”

“If it had a social security number, Ronan had fought with it.”

Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“If you never saw the stars, candles were enough.”

“There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid.”

“He was brother to a liar and brother to an angel, son of a dream and son of a dreamer.”

“Arbores loqui latine. The trees speak Latin.”

Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“As they moved through the old barn, Adam felt Ronan’s eyes glance off him and away, his disinterest practiced but incomplete.”

“This noisy, lush religion had created him just as much as his father’s world of dreams; it seemed impossible for all of Ronan to exist in one person.”

“He left bloody fingerprints on the rock, but there was something satisfying about that. I was here. I exist. I’m alive, because I bleed.” 

“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 the other.”

Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“His feelings for Adam were an oil spill; he’d let them overflow and now there wasn’t a damn place in the ocean that wouldn’t catch fire if he dropped a match.”

“He was a book, and he was holding his final pages, and he wanted to get to the end to find out how it went, and he didn’t want it to be over.”

“I don’t care to be pretty,” Blue shot back hotly, “I care to look on the outside like I look on the inside.”

“Where the hell is Ronan?” Gansey asked, echoing the words that thousands of humans had uttered since mankind developed speech.”

“On the outside, the three Lynch brothers appeared remarkably dissimilar: Declan, a butter-smooth politician; Ronan, a bull in a china-shop world; Matthew, a sunlit child. On the inside, the Lynch brothers were remarkably similar: They all loved cars, themselves, and each other.”

Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King

“You are made of dreams and this world is not for you.”

“He had blue eyes. People generally think blue eyes are pretty, but his were not. They were not cornflower, sky, baby, indigo, azure. His were iceberg, squall, hypothermia, eventual death.”

“There’s a thing Soulages said. ‘A window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite—it should look inside of us.”

There were creatures you didn’t want to meet in person if you weren’t with Ronan Lynch. There were places you might get trapped forever if you weren’t with Ronan Lynch.

“If you’ve ever looked into a fire and been unable to look away, it’s that. If you’ve ever looked at the mountains and found you’re not breathing, it’s that. If you’ve ever looked at the moon and felt tears in your eyes, it’s that. It’s the stuff between stars, the space between roots, the thing that makes electricity get up in the morning.”

Maggie Stiefvater, Call Down the Hawk

“There are moments that you’ll remember for the rest of your life and there are moments that you think you’ll remember for the rest of your life, and it’s not often they turn out to be the same moment.”

“It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.”

“He is slow, and the sea sings to us both, but he returns to me.”

“It’s easy to convince men to love you, Puck. All you have to do is be a mountain they have to climb or a poem they don’t understand.”

“What it’s like is a battle. A mess of horses and men and blood. The fastest and strongest of what is left from two weeks of preparation on the sand. It’s the surf in your face, the deadly magic of November on your skin, the Scorpio drums in the place of your heartbeat. It’s speed, if you’re lucky. It’s life and it’s death or it’s both, and there’s nothing like it.”

 Maggie Stiefvater, The Scorpio Races

Have you read anything by Maggie Stiefvater? Do you have a favourite quote by an author or from a book beginning with M? Let me know in the comments!