The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

attraction can look an awful lot like recognition in the wrong light.

A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.

So she longs for the mornings, but she settles for the nights, and if it cannot be love, well, then, at least it is not lonely.

Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?

Time has no face, no form, nothing to fight against. But in his mocking smile, his toying words, the darkness has given her the one thing she truly needs: an enemy.

“Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”

It is easy to be honest when there are no wrong words, because the words don’t stick. When whatever you say belongs to only you.

Easy to stay on the path when the road is straight and the steps are numbered.

And this, he decides, is what a good-bye should be. Not a period, but an ellipsis, a statement trailing off, until someone is there to pick it up.