Burned (Fever #7)

by Karen Marie Moning

He, who had once been whole, was halved, without hope of ever being complete again. And when you’ve known that kind of love, to endure the creeping passage of time without it is to live a half-life where nothing ever feels real.

I want to tell her revenge is a devil you don’t want to worship. In destroying your enemy you become it.

Fear of the power you believe someone or something has over you is nothing but a jail cell you choose to walk into. By obsessing over freeing yourself from the Book, you become more certainly its prisoner.

I’m a moth to his flame and it frightens me how willingly I’d burn my wings off for him. Destroy the world. Follow him to Hell. It’s scary to feel like you can’t breathe without someone. That a man has so much power over you because you love him as much as, if not more than, you care for yourself.

“Someone told you life was easy. You believed them,” he mocks.

What no one tells you is that when someone you love dies, you lose them twice. Once to death, the second time to acceptance, and you don’t walk that long, dark passage between the two alone. Grief takes every shuffling, unwilling step with you, offering a seductive bouquet of memories that can only blossom south of sanity. You can stay there, nose buried in the petals of the past. But you’re never really alive again. Spend enough time with ghosts, you become one.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Death is the final chapter in a book you can’t unread. You keep waiting to feel like the person you were before that chapter ended. You never will.

The only thing that keeps us rooted in the past is our refusal to embrace the present.