Edith

“You say you're looking for beauty, but this isn't the way to achieve it, my dear friend. You won't find it while you look to yourself, as if everything revolved around you. Don't you see? It's exactly the other way around, precisely the other way around. You mustn't be careful, you must get hurt. What I am trying to explain, child, is that unless you allow the beauty you seek to hurt you, to break you and knock you down, you'll never find it.”
― Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera, The Awakening of Miss Prim

“Will bit at his lip. This was the last time Jem, as Jem, might ever touch him. The sharp memory went through him like a knife—of years of Jem’s light tap on his shoulder, his hand reaching to help Will up when he fell, Jem holding him back when he was furious, Will’s own hands on Jem’s thin shoulders as Jem coughed blood into his shirt. “Listen to me. I am leaving, but I am living. I will not be gone from you entirely, Will. When you fight now, I will be still by you. When you walk in the world, I will be the light at your side, the ground steady under your feet, the force that drives the sword in your hand. We are bound, beyond the oath. The Marks did not change that. The oath did not change that. It merely gave words to something that existed already.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“And for a moment they were Jem-and-Will again. Will could see Jem, but also through him, to the past. Will remembered the two of them, running through the dark streets of London, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, seraph blades gleaming in their hands; hours in the training room, shoving each other into mud puddles, throwing snowballs at Jessamine from behind an ice fort in the courtyard, asleep like puppies on the rug in front of the fire.
Ave atque vale... Hail and farewell. He had never given much thought to the words before, he had never thought about why they were not just a farewell but also a greeting. Every meeting led to a parting, and so it would, as long as it was mortal. In every meeting there was some of the sorrow of parting, but in every parting there was some joy of the meeting as well.
He would not forget the joy.
...
"Wo men shi sheng si ji jiao," said Will, and he saw Jem's eyes widen, fractionally, and the spark of amusement inside them. "Go in peace, James Carstairs.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“The things about Shakespeare is, he's so eloquent...he speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains