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Kindle Notes & Highlights
A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing. . . .” —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the
dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed —Charlotte Brontë, “Evening Solace
I have learned good lessons in how to be hateful over all these years. But I feel myself losing myself—” He groped for words. “I feel myself diminished, parts of me spiraling away into the darkness, that which is good and honest and true—If you hold it away from yourself long enough, do you lose it entirely? If no one cares for you at all, do you even really exist?
“Who ever said we were owed happiness?
“Must I go bound while you go free Must I love a man who doesn’t love me Must I be born with so little art As to love a man who’ll break my heart?
I feel myself dissolving, vanishing into nothingness, for if there is no one in the world who cares for you, do you really exist at all?
But all these were things he could not want, because they were things he could not have, and wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness.
“Unrequited love is a ridiculous state, and it makes those in it behave ridiculously.
Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again. For then the night will more
than pay The hopeless longing of the day. —Matthew Arnold, “
“I’ve never minded it,” he went on. “Being lost, that is. I had always thought one could not be truly lost if one knew one’s own heart. But I fear I may be lost without knowing yours.
“I could not tell you if I loved you the first moment I saw you, or if it was the second or third or fourth. But I remember the first moment I looked at you walking toward me and realized that somehow the rest of the world seemed to vanish when I was with you. That you were the center of everything I did and felt and thought.”
“There is a force and strength in love,” he said. “That is what that inscription means. It is in the Shadowhunter wedding ceremony, too. For love is as strong as death.
“I can offer you my life, but it is a short life; I can offer you my heart, though I have no idea how many more beats it shall sustain. But I love you enough to hope that you will not care that I am being selfish in trying to make the rest of my life—whatever its length—happy, by spending it with you. I want to be married to you, Tessa. I want it more than I have ever wanted anything else in my life.”
It was books that kept me from taking my own life after I thought I could never love anyone, never be loved by anyone again. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could
be honest with me, and I with them.
