One must always be careful of books.

When you love someone, you don't have a choice. Love takes your choices away. - Clary Fray

Jem spoke with enormous care; talking to Will about anything personal was like trying not to startle away a wild animal.

If there is a life after this one, he said, let me meet you in it, James Carstairs.

Pulvis et umbra sumus. It's a line from Horace. 'We are dust and shadows'. Appropriate, don't you think?" Will said. "It's not a long life, killing demons; one tends to die young, and then they burn your body - dust to dust, in the literal sense. And then we vanish into the shadows of history, nary a mark on the page of a mundane book to remind the world that once we existed at all.

I know what I'm asking. For you to find a needle in - God, not even a haystack. A needle in a tower of other needles." "Plunge your hand in a tower of needles," said Magnus, "and you are likely to cut yourself badly. Are you sure this is what you want?

He felt his heart, which no longer beat, contract, and he wondered if there was anything in the world as painful as not being able to protect the people you loved.