Quotes from Pale Kings and Princes

“Simon, don’t you think I’m scared of that too? You’re not the only one on that ledge. If we jump, we jump together. We fall together.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“It's hard to believe how much light you cand find in the darkness, when you have someone who loves you.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“This stupid weapons-shopping idea. Last time I take dating advice from Jace.” “You let Jace plan our date?”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“He took her in his arms and kissed her-kissed her the way he'd been longing to kiss her since he first laid eyes on her, kissed her not like a romance novel hero or a Shadowhunter warrior or some imaginary character from the past, but like Simon Lewis kissing the girl he loved more than anything in the world.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“And I also know that loving someone—even when it’s scary, even when there are consequences—is never the wrong thing to do.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“This is how a faerie loves: with her whole body and soul.
This is how a faerie loves: with destruction.
This is how a faerie loves: with a gift.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“She smiled and it was the kind of smile you give to someone who can make you want to throttle them and kiss them all at the same time.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“I love you, she told him, night after night, for seven years. Faeries cannot lie, and he knew that.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“You never called me. I saved you from getting decapitated by an Eidolon demon and you didn't even call.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“Humans are animals. Pain is their nature.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“I'm sorry, Simon said, thinking they had to be the lamest, most useless words in the English language.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“Simon had never realized what a sad sound it was: hope.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“Losing myself,” he said.

“What?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. Losing myself, in this. In you. I’ve spent this whole year trying to find myself, to figure out who I am, and now there’s you, there’s us, there’s this all-consuming, terrifying black hole of a feeling, and if I give into it . . . I feel like I’m standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, you know? Like, here’s something bigger, deeper than the human mind is built to fathom. And I’m just supposed to . . . jump in?”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“In the Land under the Hill, in the Time Before …

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful lady of the Seelie Court who lost her heart to the son of an angel.
Once upon a time, there were two boys come to the land of Faerie, brothers noble and bold. One brother caught a glimpse of the fair lady and, thunderstruck by her beauty, pledged himself to her. Pledged himself to stay. This was the boy Andrew. His brother, the boy Arthur, would not leave his side.
And so the boys stayed beneath the hill, and Andrew loved the lady, and Arthur despised her.
And so the lady kept her boy close to her side, kept this beautiful creature who swore his fealty to her, and when her sister lay claim to the other, the lady let him be taken away, for he was nothing.

She gave Andrew a silver chain to wear around his neck, a token of her love, and she taught him the ways of the Fair Folk. She danced with him in revels beneath starry skies. She fed him moonshine and showed him how to give way to the wild.

Some nights they heard Arthur’s screams, and she told him it was an animal in pain, and pain was in an animal’s nature.

She did not lie, for she could not lie.

Humans are animals.

Pain is their nature.

For seven years they lived in joy. She owned his heart, and he hers, and somewhere, beyond, Arthur screamed and screamed. Andrew didn’t know; the lady didn’t care; and so they were happy.
Until the day one brother discovered the truth of the other.
The lady thought her lover would go mad with the grief of it and the guilt. And so, because she loved the boy, she wove him a story of deceitful truths, the story he would want to believe. That he had been ensorcelled to love her; that he had never betrayed his brother; that he was only a slave; that these seven years of love had been a lie.
The lady set the useless brother free and allowed him to believe he had freed himself.
The lady subjected herself to the useless brother’s attack and allowed him to believe he had killed her.
The lady let her lover renounce her and run away.
And the lady beheld the secret fruits of their union and kissed them and tried to love them. But they were only a piece of her boy. She wanted all of him or none of him.
As she had given him his story, she gave him his children.
She had nothing left to live for, then, and so lived no longer.

This is the story she left behind, the story her lover will never know; this is the story her daughter will never know.

This is how a faerie loves: with her whole body and soul.

This is how a faerie loves: with destruction.

I love you, she told him, night after night, for seven years. Faeries cannot lie, and he knew that.
I love you, he told her, night after night, for seven years. Humans can lie, and so she let him believe he lied to her, and she let his brother and his children believe it, and she died hoping they would believe it forever.

This is how a faerie loves: with a gift.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“Simon, don't you think I'm scared of that too? You're not the only one on that ledge. If we jump, we jump together. We fall together.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“You’re not the only one on that ledge. If we jump, we jump together. We fall together.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

“Así es como un hada ama, con todo su cuerpo y alma. Así es como un hada ama con la destrucción. Te amo, le dijo ella, noche tras noche durante siete años. Las hadas no pueden mentir y el lo sabia. Te amo, le dijo el, noche tras noche durante siete años. Los seres humanos pueden mentir y por eso ella le dejo creer que le mintió a ella, y ella dejo que su hermano y sus lo creyeran, y ella murió esperando creer siempre. Así es como un hada ama como un regalo.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Pale Kings and Princes

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“The gospel is not outward rituals and sacrifices, it is a living sacrifice. It is to have the laws of God written in our heart. It is to have a soft, listening, responding heart to God.”
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“A new moon lay on its back, and stars were out. Here, away from lights and sounds of town or village, the night was deep, the black sky stretching, fathomless, away among the spheres to some unimaginable world where gods walked, and suns and moons showered down like petals falling. Some power there is that draws men's eyes and hearts up and outward, beyond the heavy clay that fastens them to earth. Music can take them, and the moon's light, and, I suppose, love, though I had not known it then, except in worship.”
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“The Dying Man"

in memoriam W.B. Yeats

1. His words

I heard a dying man
Say to his gathered kin,
“My soul’s hung out to dry,
Like a fresh salted skin;
I doubt I’ll use it again.

“What’s done is yet to come;
The flesh deserts the bone,
But a kiss widens the rose
I know, as the dying know
Eternity is Now.

“A man sees, as he dies,
Death’s possibilities;
My heart sways with the world.
I am that final thing,
A man learning to sing.

2. What Now?

Caught in the dying light,
I thought myself reborn.
My hand turn into hooves.
I wear the leaden weight
Of what I did not do.

Places great with their dead,
The mire, the sodden wood,
Remind me to stay alive.
I am the clumsy man
The instant ages on.

I burned the flesh away,
In love, in lively May.
I turn my look upon
Another shape than hers
Now, as the casement blurs.

In the worst night of my will,
I dared to question all,
And would the same again.
What’s beating at the gate?
Who’s come can wait.

3. The Wall

A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind
To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn!
The figure at my back is not my friend;
The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn.
I found my father when I did my work,
Only to lose myself in this small dark.

Though it reject dry borders of the seen,
What sensual eye can keep and image pure,
Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn?
A slow growth is a hard thing to endure.
When figures our of obscure shadow rave,
All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave.

The wall has entered: I must love the wall,
A madman staring at perpetual night,
A spirit raging at the visible.
I breathe alone until my dark is bright.
Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn
When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun.

4. The Exulting

Once I delighted in a single tree;
The loose air sent me running like a child–
I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after image of the inner eye.
Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone;
I die into this life, alone yet not alone.

Was it a god his suffering renewed?–
I saw my father shrinking in his skin;
He turned his face: there was another man,
Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid.
He quivered like a bird in birdless air,
Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere.

Fish feed on fish, according to their need:
My enemies renew me, and my blood
Beats slower in my careless solitude.
I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed.
I think a bird, and it begins to fly.
By dying daily, I have come to be.

All exultation is a dangerous thing.
I see you, love, I see you in a dream;
I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum,
And that slow humming rises into song.
A breath is but a breath: I have the earth;
I shall undo all dying with my death.

5. They Sing, They Sing

All women loved dance in a dying light–
The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon!
Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one,
Then settles back to shade and the long night.
A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn,
And that cry takes me back where I was born.

Who thought love but a motion in the mind?
Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing?
I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing;
Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend.
I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds,
They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds.

I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone:
What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!–
Eternity defined, and strewn with straw,
The fury of the slug beneath the stone.
The vision moves, and yet remains the same.
In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am.

The edges of the summit still appall
When we brood on the dead or the beloved;
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.”
― Theodore Roethke, quote from The Collected Poems

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