Lovely Violent Things (Hollow's Row, #2)

by Trisha Wolfe

It’s a rare breed of philosophy scholar who gets off the regurgitating merry-go-round and actually jumps into the abyss of the psyche. Becoming stark raving mad. Should Nietzsche be respected for his self-sacrifice, or pitied?

As seekers of knowledge, we ask the universe to reveal itself. But once you see, you can never unsee.

We don’t get the choice of where we originate from; but everything after is all choice.

It was the damn simplicity of how tragically basic we are. Upon that realization, I decided there is a difference between pondering life and living it.

If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

The human condition is such that we must give our overpowering emotions a name, even fashion them into monsters. So we can comprehend the depth of our heartache, understand our profound grief. So we can make sense of meaningless tragedies, and the pain we ourselves inflict. Then the resulting guilt. So there’s a reason for all our suffering.

And further, so we can cast it out of our person as something abstract. How else can we reconcile all that we endure?

life has never once asked my permission before it decided to blow my world apart. I don’t expect it to start now.

One way to catch a lying sociopath is to let them talk.

We live in the flicker. A running blaze on a plain, a flash of lightning in the clouds. That blink of a moment. Our existence is that fleeting.

“This world has been around longer than your laws. Why try to live by them and their rules? In time, they’ll only change again. So take what you want from this life, because it only gives you a small window to choose.”

Fact or fiction, truth or conspiracy theory—it makes no difference. History is bound and recorded by the violence of those who believed.

Whether it existed before, or was cloaked by a life of love and happiness, she has a darkness inside her—one she taps into to see beneath the veil.

Most people are too frightened to look that deeply. But this is where she fights her demons.