The grandeur of the Institute never failed to impress Magnus - the way it towered high and mighty above everything else, timeless and unmoving in its Gothic disapproval of all that was modern and changeable.

If there was one thing she was learning from all this, it was how easy it was to lose everything you had always thought you'd have forever.

Going round and around inside a dryer can be fatal, whereas pasta is rarely fatal. Unless Isabelle makes it.

OR am I the only warlock you know?" "No... but you are the only warlock we know who happens to dating a friend of ours.

You're killing me because you want me to give a message to God for you?" Jace shook his head, the point of the blade scraping across his throat. "You're crazier than I thought

He pulled the Carstairs family ring from his finger and held it out to Will. "Take it." Will let his eyes drift down toward it, and then up to Jem's face. A dozen awful things he could say, or do, went through his mind. One did not slough off a persona so quickly, he had found. He had pretended to be cruel for so many years that the pretense was still what he reached for first, as a man might absently turn his carriage toward the home he had lived in for all his life, despite the fact that he had recently moved. "You wish to marry me now?" he said, at last.

That was what humans did: They left on another messages through time, pressed between pages or carved into rock. Like reaching out a hand through time, and trusting in a phantom hoped-for hand to catch yours. Humans did not last forever. They could only hope what they made would endure.