“Now that the real and the imagined had collided, he wondered if she, like he, longed for the past, for the normal. He wondered if normalcy was something, like vision or silence, you didn't realize was precious until you lost it.”

“He wondered if he might be in love, but realized it was far more likely he was dying.”

“He hadn’t stopped wanting love. He had simply, somehow, stopped looking.
He wondered if you could be exhausted without knowing it, if hope could be lost not all at once but could slip away gradually, day by day, and vanish before you ever realized.”

“He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.”

“He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard […]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.”

“It had already occurred to him that he would probably never be safe again in his life and he wondered if that was something that you got used to. And if you did?”

“She didn't know how much she'd been hoping that he still loved her, until she felt how much it hurt to realize he didn't.”

“Simon bristled. She wasn’t his Isabelle, not anymore. He wondered if she ever truly had been. Isabelle didn’t seem like the type of girl to belong to someone. It was one of the things he liked best about her.”

“What was it like, he wondered, to care about something so passionately? He suspected it made her somehow more alive than he was.”

“I'm Magnus." He smiled, showing blinding white teeth.
"Magnus Bane."
"Are we long-lost friends, by any chance?" Simon said.
"Just wondering."
"No, we never got along all that well," said Magnus.
"Long-lost acquaintances? Compadres? My cat liked you.”