MAGGIE STIEFVATER

MAGGIE STIEFVATER is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels Shiver, Linger, and Forever. She is also the author of Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception and Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie. She lives in Virginia with her husband and their two children.

Her novel The Scorpio Races was named a Michael L. Printz Honor Book by the American Library Association. She lives in Virginia.

You can visit her online at www.maggiestiefvater.com.

THE RAVEN BOYS, THE DREAM THIEVES & BLUE LILY, LILY BLUE

The problem with being weird was that everyone else was normal.

Ronan and Gansey were laughing at a joke where the rest of the world was the punch line.

There was a breath's silence. This was where Gansey, if he were Ronan, would swear. Where if he were Adam, he'd close his eyes. If he were Blue, he'd snap in exasperation.

But in everything Gansey didn't say, in every feeling he didn't paint on his face, he was shouting:

It's gone.

A secret is a strange thing.

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.

And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it.

Sometimes, some rare times, a secret stays undiscovered because it is something too big for the mind to hold. It is too strange, too vast, too terrifying to contemplate.

All of us have secrets in our lives. We're keepers or kept-from, players or played. Secrets and cockroaches — that's what will be left at the end of it all.

"There aren't terrible ideas," the Gray Man said. "Just ideas done terribly."

If you kiss him. When you kiss him.

"One's your fault. The other one, you just happen to be there when it happens. Like, when you kiss him, POW, he gets hit by a bear. Totally not your fault.

"So what you're saying is you can't explain it."

"I did explain it."

"No, you used nouns and verbs together in a pleasing but illogical format."

It was a sort of ferocious, quiet beauty, the sort that wouldn't let you admire it. The sort of beauty that just always hurt.

 "Tears don't become us."

Her mother wiped her eyes on the shoulder of Blue's T-shirt. "You're right. What becomes us?"

"Action."

Solutions were easy, once you knew what was in your way.

'Our hearts must grow resolute, our courage more valiant, our spirits must be great, though our strength grows less.'

A sword is never a killer; it is a tool in the killer's hand.

Adam Parrish was lonesome.

There is no good word for the opposite of lonesome. One might be tempted to suggest togetherness or contentment, but the fact that these two other words bear definitions unrelated to each other perfectly displays why lonesome cannot be properly mirrored. It does not mean solitude, nor alone, nor lonely, although lonesome can contain all of those words in itself.

Lonesome means a state of being apart. Of being other. Alone-some.

Adam was not always alone, but he was always lonesome. Even in a group, he was slowly perfecting the skill of holding himself separate.