I don't think I ever intended specifically to write for the young adult market. It's just that when the idea for City of Bones came to me, I knew the main characters were teenagers. In my mind they were just very clearly the ages they were, which turned out to mean it was a YA novel.

If you love someone, you're not supposed to want them to come back. Better a peaceful sleep in the earth than the life of a zombie--not really dead but not really alive, either.

When I am in the darkness, I want to think of it in the light, with you. - James Carstairs

There was human goodness in the world, she thought-all caught up with desires and dreams, regrets and bitterness, resentments and power, but it was there.

Did Brother Zachariah just steal our cat?

Life is a book and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read.

The witchlight made his skin paler, his eyes more intently blue. They were the color of the water in the North Atlantic, where the ice drifted on its blue-black surface like the snow clinging to the dark glass pane of a window.