The Raven Boys Quotes

2025-08-17

Music/Media Favourites List

I love the Raven Boys wahhh Maggie Stiefvater, you visionary.

• Noah seemed about to put his hands in his pockets and then didn't. Noah's hands seemed to belong fewer places that other people's. pg 69
• From his father, Gansey had gotten a head for logic, an affection for research, and a trust fund the size of most state lotteries.
  • From their father, the Lynch brothers had gotten indefatigable egos, a decade of obscure Irish music instrument lessons, and the ability to box like they meant it. Niall Lynch had not been around very much, but when he had been, he had been an excellent teacher. pg 69
• On one of the walls, a red Sharpie had scrawled the word BEEZLEBUB and Ronan’s number below. It was hard to imagine Declan choosing to inflict Nino’s facilities on his girlfriend. - pg 72
• The trust funds from their fathers had ensured that neither of them had to work for a living, ever, if they didn’t choose to. They were extraneous parts in the machine that was society, a fact that sat differently on Ronan’s shoulders than Gansey’s. - pg 75
• “I convinced them not to call the cops,” Adam said. He was good at making things quiet. - pg 75
• It didn’t escape Blue that his slightly accented voice was as nice as his looks. It was all Henrietta sunset: hot front-porch swings and cold iced-tea glasses, cicadas louder than your thoughts. - pg 79
• More than anything the journal wanted. It wanted more than it could hold, more than words could describe, more than diagrams could illustrate. Longing bursts from the pages every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every printed definition. There was something pained and melancholic about it.
• It wasn’t an easy thing to leave the Parrish household in the middle of the night. The consequences of getting caught could leave physical evidence and it was getting too warm for long sleeves. Gansey felt wretched for asking this of him.
• "Where did you say you found the bird again?"
  "In my head." Ronan’s laugh was a sharp jackal cry
  "Dangerous place", commented Noah
  "Not for a chain saw"

• Czerny had pulled up in his red Mustang. He hadn’t gotten out of the car.
  “Does this make you white trash now?” he’d asked. Czerny didn’t really have a sense of humor. He just sometimes said things that happened to be funny. Whelk, standing in the wreckage of his life, didn’t laugh this time. - pg 100
• “This is clearly a boy’s journal. Also, it’s taking him forever to find this thing. You’d have already found it.”
  • She realized Persephone was right; if the journal had been hers, she would’ve just copied down the information she needed, rather than all this cutting and pasting. The fragments were intriguing but unnecessary; whoever put that journal together must love the hunt itself, the process of research. The aesthetic properties of the journal couldn’t be accidental; it was an academic piece of art. - pg 107
• At the sight of Gansey’s Aglionby sweater, Adam’s father had charged out, firing on all cylinders. For weeks after that, Ronan had called Gansey “the S.R.F.,” where the S stood for Soft, the R stood for Rich, and the F for something else. - pg 109
• Gansey was clever enough and he was good at studying if nothing else, so it hadn’t been a problem to skip classes or push homework to the bottom of the list. But at Aglionby, there were no failing grades. If you dropped below a B average, you were out on your ass. And Dick Gansey II had let his son know that if he couldn’t hack it in a private school, Gansey was cut out of the will. - pg 111
• “Lynch!” the call came again. “I’m going to fuck you up.”
  “Some people don’t take losing very well,” Ronan replied.
  “Was that Kavinsky? Don’t tell me you’ve been racing again.”
  “Don’t ask me, then.” - pg 113
• Gansey asked, “Why are you carrying that bag? Oh my God, you have that bird in there, don’t you.”
  “She has to be fed every two hours.”
  “How do you know?”
  “Jesus, the Internet, Gansey.” Ronan pulled open the door to Borden House; as soon as they breached the threshold, everything within sight was covered with navy blue carpet. - pg 113
• Ronan had declared their Latin teacher a socially awkward shitbird earlier in the year and further clarified that he didn’t like him. Because he despised everyone, Ronan wasn’t a good judge of character, [...] But Whelk was too young to be a mentor and too old to be a peer, and Gansey couldn’t find an angle. pg 114
• “We could do a triple reading for you,” Persephone said.
  She stood at the base of the stairs, small and pale and made largely of hair. The man stared at her, though Blue wasn’t certain if this was because he was considering Persephone’s proposal or because Persephone was quite a lot to take in at first glance.
  “What,” the man asked finally, “is that?”
  It took Blue a moment to realize that he meant “triple reading” rather than Persephone. - pg 119
• After he knocked, he looked out across the flat, ugly field of dead grass. The idea that you had to pay for the beauty in Henrietta should have occurred to him before then, but it hadn’t. No matter how many times Adam told him he was foolish about money, he couldn’t seem to get any wiser about it.
  There is no spring here, Gansey realized, and the thought was unexpectedly grim.
  Adam’s mother answered his knock. She was a shadow of Adam — the same elongated features, the same wide-set eyes. - pg 129
• “Don’t pretend you know,” he said. “Don’t come here and pretend you know anything.”
  Gansey told himself to walk away. To say nothing else. Then he said, “Don’t pretend you have anything to be proud of, then.” - pg 129
• Now Adam looked at Gansey. There was something fierce and chilling in his eyes, an unnamable something that Gansey was always afraid would eventually take over completely. This, he knew, was a compromise, a risky gift that he could choose to reject. - pg 135
• As they charged back onto the driveway on the other side of the Toyota, Gansey could feel Robert Parrish’s stare follow them.
  The weight of that gaze seemed like a more substantial promise of the future than anything a psychic might tell him. - pg 136
• There were three boys in the doorway, backlit by the evening sun as Neeve had been so many weeks ago. Three sets of shoulders: one square, one built, one wiry. - pg 139
• His dusty brown hair was mussed, too, in that way that Virginia warmth always managed. But the watch was still there, large enough to knock out bank robbers, and he still had that handsome glow. The glow that meant that not only had he never been poor, but his father hadn’t, nor his father’s father, nor his father’s father’s father. She couldn’t tell if he was actually tremendously good-looking or merely tremendously wealthy. Perhaps they were the same thing. - pg 140
• They filled the hallway to overflowing, somehow, the three of them, loud and male and so comfortable with one another that they allowed no one else to be comfortable with them. They were a pack of sleek animals armored with their watches and their Top-Siders and the expensive cut of their uniforms. - pg 140
• “What happened to your face?” Blue asked.
  Adam shrugged ruefully. Either he or Ronan smelled like a parking garage. His voice was self-deprecating. “Do you think it makes me look tougher?”
  What it did was make him look was more fragile and dirty, somehow, like a teacup unearthed from the soil, but Blue didn’t say that.
  Ronan said, “It makes you look like a loser.” - pg 141
• “What do you mean, very loud?” Gansey asked. He was, Blue thought, very clearly the ringleader of this little pack. They all kept looking to him for their cues of how to interpret the situation. - pg 143
• Gansey and Adam shared some sort of private conversation with their eyes. It was the sort of thing Blue was used to transpiring between her mother and Persephone or Calla, and she hadn’t thought anyone else really capable of it. It also made her feel strangely jealous; she wanted something like that, a bond strong enough to transcend words. - pg 143
• You’re ambitious, but you feel like someone’s asking something of you you’re not willing to give. Asking you to compromise your principles. Someone close to you, I think. Your father?”
  “Brother, I think,” Persephone said.
  “I don’t have a brother, ma’am,” Adam replied. But Blue saw his eyes dart to Gansey. - pg 144
• Blue liked how polite he was. It seemed different than Gansey’s politeness. When Gansey was polite, it made him powerful. When Adam was polite, he was giving power away. - pg 144
• There’s so much coming out of him, it shouldn’t be possible. Do you remember that woman who came in who was pregnant with quadruplets? It was like that, but worse.”
  “He’s pregnant?” Blue asked.
  “He’s creating,” Calla said. “That space is creating, too. I don’t know how to say it any better than that.” - pg 156
• With visible effort, Ronan pulled himself back, sorted himself out. None of the Lynch brothers liked to appear anything other than intentional, even if it was intentionally cruel. Instead of answering, he asked, “Do you not want me to come?” - pg 163
  Something stuck in Gansey’s chest. “I would take all of you anywhere with me.”
• And now Gansey was a king here, and he didn’t even know how to use it. - pg 174
• Czerny still hadn’t cared, not really. He was the most mild, ambitionless creature Whelk had ever seen, which was probably why Whelk liked to hang out with him so much. Czerny didn’t have a problem being no better than the other Aglionby students. He was content to trot along after Whelk. These days, when Whelk was trying to comfort himself, he told himself that Czerny was a sheep, but sometimes he slipped and remembered him as loyal instead. - pg 176
• It was just a spray of baby’s breath around a white carnation; they smelled prettier than they looked. [...] Now the tiny bunch of flowers made sense. They matched Adam’s frayed sweater. - pg 181
• Even the way the other boy had moved, Adam recalled, had struck him: confident and careless, shoulders rolled back, chin tilted, an emperor’s son. As the cashier swiped Adam’s card again, both of them pretending the machine might have misread the magnetic stripe, Adam watched the other boy go out to the curb to where a shiny black car waited.
  He’d had to leave the boxes and the toothpaste on the conveyer belt, eyes hot with shamed tears that wouldn’t fall.
  He’d never wanted to be someone else so badly.
  In his head, that boy was Ronan, but in retrospect, Adam thought it couldn’t have been. He wouldn’t have been old enough to have his driver’s license yet. - pg 187
• He was still wearing those idiotic Top-Siders she’d noticed at the reading, this time paired with cargo shorts and a yellow polo shirt that made it look as if he were prepared for any sort of emergency, so long as the emergency involved him falling onto a yacht. - pg 194
• Noah appeared beside Blue. He looked joyful and adoring, like a Labrador retriever. Noah had decided almost immediately that he would do anything for Blue - pg 238
• Plainly, Gansey heard a crackly statement in Latin. He wished, suddenly, that he’d studied harder in class as he repeated the words phonetically to Ronan. - pg 248
• “Because it’s like we’re going into someone’s house.” Blue tried not to look at Gansey’s boat shoes; she felt better about him as a person if she pretended he wasn’t wearing them. - pg 262
• He strode over to the ruined church. This, Blue had discovered, was how Gansey got places — striding. Walking was for ordinary people. - pg 264
• Gansey uncovered the entire skeleton. It lay crumpled, one leg crooked up, arms sprawled to either side of its skull, a freeze-frame of tragedy. - pg 273
• “He’s moving out,” Declan said. “Remind Gansey of that. No Aglionby, no Monmouth.”
  Then you’ve killed him, Adam thought, because he couldn’t imagine Ronan living under a roof with his brother. He couldn’t imagine Ronan living under a roof without Gansey, period. But all he said was, “I’ll tell him.” - pg 288
• “Brother,” Gansey interrupted. “Really, I’ve come to see him as a brother. And to my parents, he’s a son. In every sense of the word. Emotionally, practically, fiscally.” - pg 291
• Nothing flaps him. Such a character. This last bit was because he collected strange old things and looked in holes in walls and had a journal of things that had happened on the fourteenth of April every year since history began. “Do you have any idea why your sister purchased that hideous bronze plate for three thousand dollars? Is she angry at your mother? Is she trying to play a practical joke?” - pg 293
• “Melancholy? Helen’s an idiot.”
  His father clucked his tongue. “Dick, you don’t mean that. Word choice?”
  Gansey turned off the engine and exchanged a look with his father. “She bought Mom a bronze plate for her birthday.”
  Gansey, Sr., made a little hm noise, which meant that Gansey, Jr., had a point. - pg 296
• “My mother used to say, ‘Don’t throw compliments away, so long as they’re free.’” Adam's face was very earnest. “That one wasn’t meant to cost you anything, Blue.” - pg 302
• “That seems …” Adam sought words. “Very sensible.”
  The precise adjective Neeve had found for Blue that very first week. So she truly was sensible. This was distressing. She felt like she’d done so much work to appear as eccentric as possible, and still, when it came down to it, she was sensible. - pg 303
• She wasn’t exactly sure that she did — the raven was not quite done-looking — but it was a matter of principle. She realized, again, that she was trying to impress Ronan only because he was impossible to impress [...] Ronan’s smile cut his face, but he looked kinder than Blue had ever seen him, like the raven in his hand was his heart, finally laid bare. - pg 304
• Are you afraid of Gansey?”
  The boys didn’t answer; they didn’t have to. Whatever Gansey was to them, it was bulletproof. - pg 310
• The conversation with Pinter gnawed at Gansey. Bribery. So that’s what it had come to. He thought this feeling inside him was shame. No matter how hard he tried, he kept becoming a Gansey. - pg 310
• The thing about Ronan was that he had no limits, no fears, no boundaries. If Gansey had been Ronan, he would’ve crushed the gas pedal to the floor until the road or a cop or a tree stopped him. - pg 311
• It was hard to go from the idea that Barrington Whelk was creepy in a way that was entertaining to joke about with Ronan and Adam to the idea that Barrington Whelk had a gun and was pointing it at Gansey. - pg 313
• The journal weighted his hands. He didn’t need it. He knew everything in it.
  But it was him. He was giving everything that he’d worked for away.
  I will get a new one. - pg 316
• And his journal. He felt raw: the chronicle of his fiercest desires stripped from him by force. - pg 318
• “Persephone,” Calla thundered. She’d gotten over her shock and was now merely angry at being shocked. “You should make some noise when you enter rooms.”
  “I did let the stair squeak,” Persephone pointed out. “Maura said she’ll be back at midnight, so be done by then.” - pg 322
• Calla switched the candle from her left hand to her right. “Basically, your father showed up eighteen years ago, swept Maura off her feet, made her an absolutely useless friend for a year, got her pregnant, and then vanished after you were born. He was cagey and cute, so I assumed he was trailer-park trash with a police record.” - pg 233
• The kitchen was quite full. It had never been a large kitchen to start with, and by the time three boys, four women, and one Blue were in it, it felt like it hadn’t been made with enough floor. - pg 330
• Handing him a pair of scissors, Persephone remarked, “Blue, I did tell you about putting your thumb outside of your fist if you were going to hit someone.”
  “You didn’t tell me to tell him,” Blue retorted. - pg 331
• “There are a few things going on here, obviously. Someone just tried to kill you.” This was to Gansey. “You two are telling me that your friend was killed by the man who just tried to kill him.” This was to Ronan and Adam. “You three are telling me that Neeve had a phone call with the man who killed your friend and just now tried to kill Gansey.” - pg 331
• Blue finished, “To finding Butternut.”
  “Oh, God,” Maura said. “Calla, this is your fault, isn’t it?”
  “No,” Blue said. She had to try very hard to pretend that the boys weren’t all looking at her in order to say this.
• “Lucky you taught him that hook.”
  “I never taught him to break his thumb.”
  “That’s Gansey for you. Only learns enough to be superficially competent.”
  “Loser,” Ronan agreed, and he was himself again. - pg 337
• When his father’s hand hit his cheek, it was more sound than feeling: a pop like a distant hammer hitting a nail. Adam scrambled for balance, but his foot missed the edge of the stair and his father let him fall. - pg 339
• Out of his right ear, Adam heard his mother screaming at them to stop. She was holding the phone, waving the phone at Ronan like that would make him stop. There was only one person who could stop Ronan, though, and Adam’s mother didn’t have that number. - pg 341
• The fight was dirty. At one point Ronan went down and Robert Parrish kicked, hard, at his face. Ronan’s forearms came up, all instinct, to protect himself. Parrish lunged in to rip them free. Ronan’s hand lashed out like a snake, dragging Parrish to the ground with him. - pg 342 - Adam calls his father Parrish instead of dad
• The whine in the ear had subsided and now there was … nothing. There was nothing at all.
  Gansey said, You won’t leave because of your pride? - pg 344
• If he’d considered the matter at all, he would’ve abducted Gansey for the ritual later, after he’d gotten to the heart of the ley line. Except that Gansey would never have been a good target; the manhunt for his killer would be monumental. Really, the Parrish kid would have been a better bet. No one would miss a kid born in a trailer. He always turned his homework in on time, though. - pg 346
• “They told me you didn’t have insurance,” Gansey said. They’d also told him Adam would probably never hear out of his left ear again. This was the hardest thing to internalize, that something permanent but invisible had happened. - pg 348
• He wouldn’t lie; he wanted Adam out of that house. But there had never been a part of him that wanted him hurt to accomplish that. There had never been a part of him that wanted Adam to have to run instead of march triumphantly out. - pg 349
• “God, I’m sick of your condescension, Gansey,” Adam said. “Don’t try to make me feel stupid. Who whips out repugnant? Don’t pretend you’re not trying to make me feel stupid.”
  “This is the way I talk. I’m sorry your father never taught you the meaning of repugnant. He was too busy smashing your head against the wall of your trailer while you apologized for being alive.” - pg 350
• He couldn’t stand it, all of this inside him.
  In the end, he was nobody to Adam, he was nobody to Ronan. Adam spit his words back at him and Ronan squandered however many second chances he gave him. Gansey was just a guy with a lot of stuff and a hole inside him that chewed away more of his heart every year. - pg 351
• “I don’t believe that you were really that different when you were alive,” Blue told him. But it was true that she still couldn’t reconcile this Noah with that abandoned red Mustang.
  “I think,” Noah said cautiously, remembering, “that I was worse then.” - pg 354
• “Cramming,” Noah said. “For an exam on Monday.”
  It was the nicest thing Blue had ever heard of Ronan doing. - pg 355
• What did you say your name was? I’m Roger Malory.”
  He was doing something extremely complicated with his r’s that made him difficult to understand.
  “Blue. My name’s Blue Sargent.”
  “Blair?”
  “Blue.”
  “Blaize?”
  Blue sighed. “Jane.”
  “Oh, Jane! I thought that you were saying Blue for some reason. - pg 356
• Why a boy with a life as untroubled as Gansey’s would have needed to learn how to build such a swift and convincing false front of happiness was beyond her. - pg 359
• Gansey didn’t turn his head, so his voice remained muffled. “My words are unerring tools of destruction, and I’ve come unequipped with the ability to disarm them. Can you believe I’m only alive because Noah died? What a fine sacrifice that was, what a fine contribution to the world I am.” - pg 360
• “Crushed and broken,” Gansey said. “Just the way women like ’em. Did he say this guy was badly hurt?” - pg 361
• But Whelk didn’t care for circularity. He cared for his lost car, his lost respect. He cared for the ability to sleep at night. He cared for languages dead long enough that they wouldn’t change on him. He cared for the guacamole his parents’ long-gone chef used to make. - pg 365
• “Your hair is the color of dirt,” she said.
  “It knows where it came from.” - pg 366
• Noah stood directly in front of him, hollow eyes on level with Adam’s eyes, smashed cheek on level with Adam’s ruined ear, breathless mouth inches from Adam’s sucked-in breath. Without Blue there to make him stronger, without Gansey there to make him human, without Ronan there to make him belong, Noah was a frightening thing. - pg 371
• “I don’t mean to interrupt. But in either three or seven minutes,” Persephone said, “Blue’s raven boys are going to pull down the street and sit in front of the house while they try to find a way to convince her to sneak out with them.”
  Her mother rubbed the skin between her eyebrows. “I know.”
  Blue’s heart raced. “That seems awfully specific.”
  Persephone and her mother exchanged a quick glance.
  “That’s another thing I wasn’t quite truthful about,” Maura said. “Sometimes Persephone, Calla, and I are very good with specifics.” - pg 379
• He missed Czerny.
  He had not let himself think it once in the past seven years. He had tried instead to convince himself of Czerny’s uselessness. Tried to remind himself of the practicality of the death instead.
  But instead, he remembered the sound Czerny made the first time he hit him. - pg 385
• Stepping forward, leaning over the hood of the car, Ronan pressed his finger to the windshield, and while they watched, he wrote:
  REMEMBERED - pg 389
• “Excelsior,” Gansey said bleakly.
  Blue asked, “What does that even mean?”
  Gansey looked over his shoulder at her. He was, once more, just a little bit closer to the boy she’d seen in the churchyard.
  “Onward and upward.” - pg 389
• Adam had a sneaking suspicion that, if he’d been Gansey, he would’ve been able to talk his way out of this. - pg 392
• Gansey’s voice had come from just behind the hollowed-out vision tree, and then the rest of him followed as he strode into view. Behind him were Ronan and Blue. Adam’s heart was a bird and a stone; his relief was palpable, but so was his shame.
  “Mr. Whelk,” Gansey said. Even in his glasses and with his musty bedhead, he was in full Richard Gansey III splendor — shiny and powerful. - pg 393
• But Adam knew what sacrifice meant, more than he thought Whelk or Neeve had ever had to know. He knew that it wasn’t about killing someone or drawing a shape made of bird bones.
  When it came down to it, Adam had been making sacrifices for a very long time, and he knew what the hardest one was.
  On his terms, or not at all.
  He wasn’t afraid.
  Being Adam Parrish was a complicated thing, a wonder of muscles and organs, synapses and nerves. He was a miracle of moving parts, a study in survival. The most important thing to Adam Parrish, though, had always been free will, the ability to be his own master. - pg 395
• a tremendous rippling herd of white-horned beasts, coats glinting like ice-crusted snow, snorts and cries choking the air. They were shoulder to shoulder, hectic and heedless. When they tossed their heads back, Blue saw that they were somehow like that raven carved into the hillside, like that dog sculpture she’d held, strange and sinuous. - pg 399
• “We don’t have to do anything. We leave Whelk to be worn away, just like he left Noah.”
  Gansey turned away, sickened. “What about justice?”
  “That is justice, Gansey. That’s the real thing. This place is all about being real. About being fair.”
  This all felt inherently wrong to Gansey. It was like the truth, but turned sideways. He kept looking at it, and looking at it, and it still had a young man dead who looked an awful lot like Noah’s crippled skeleton. - pg 402
• Noah’s voice, cool and barely there, whispered in her ear. “Please say something to them.”
  “You know I can’t,” she replied in a low voice.
  “You have to.”
  “I would look like a crazy person. What good would it do? What could I possibly say?"
  “Tell her I’m sorry I drank her birthday schnapps,” Noah whispered.
• Later, they dug him up. At the mouth of the access road, Ronan lounged beside his BMW with its hood ajar, acting as both roadblock and look out. Adam operated the backhoe Gansey had rented for the occasion. And Gansey transferred Noah’s bones to a duffel bag while Blue shone the flashlight over them to be certain they were all there. Adam reburied the empty casket, leaving a fresh grave identical to the one they’d begun with. - pg 407
  • “Well,” said Ronan, “I hope he likes it. I’ve pulled a muscle.”
  • Gansey scoffed, “Doing what? You were standing watch.”
• Blue hurled her arms around his neck. He looked alarmed, and then pleased, and then he pet the tufts of her hair. - pg 407