The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

“Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.”

The duality of it all.

And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it. Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow? Were the moments of beauty worth the years of pain? And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says, “Always.”

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.

That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.

“Do you know how you live three hundred years?” she says. And when he asks how, she smiles. “The same way you live one. A second at a time.”