Stick-thin, alabaster-pale Etienne LeBlanc runs down the rue de Dinan with Madame Ruelle, the baker’s wife, on his heels: the least-robust rescue ever assembled.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

I am only alive because I have not yet died.

This, she realizes, is the basis of all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.

What the war did to dreamers.

War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.

What the war did to the dreamers.

Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot.

They can march for days without eating. They impregnate every schoolgirl they meet.

You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is...Whoever wins, that's who decides the history.

Work to fulfill destiny

Peace begins with a greeting of Namaste.

The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching.

I hate McDonald's. I don't want to order my dinner by yelling into a clown's mouth. If I want my face in a clown's mouth, I'll tongue kiss Glenn Beck.

Not everything Jace did was insane and suicidal, she reminded herself. It just seemed that way. -Clary, pg.46-

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?

Tell me love isn't true, it's just something that we do.

She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy.

The greatest tragedy for a good quotation is to be anonymous; and for the bad one, is to be known and famous!

It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth