More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
People in our family, we’re born with thistles in our feet. It’s why we’re always traveling. Because if we stood still, the thistles would prick us.
you start accepting help, you start to rely on people. If you start to rely on people, you lose your self-sufficiency. If you lose your self-sufficiency, you become little more than a kite in an inconstant wind, at the mercy of whatever storms that blow.
seem to carry the same knife-glint sharpness as their
“We’re all acting, all the time. We have different selves for different people, different circumstances. You play one part for me, another part for your friends back north, another for Mira and Dad, and another altogether when you’re alone.”
“You always meet twice, Fresh. Every person, you’ll see again one day. Every inch of earth, you’ll step on later. Every coin comes back around. Maybe in the next year, maybe the next life.”
It is impossible to take a step without walking through a ghost. Every memory creates one. Every version of ourselves leaves a shadow self behind. Every regret and every promise and every touch of skin against skin.
This is what people do, during war. The same tasks as always. What, you believe you would behave differently,
Life is always just life.
wrong. That’s not respect. You
“You prove to them that you aren’t wasting yours.”
savoir vivre.”
Always listen for whiners, Tiny. A complaint is a map to a person’s weakness.”
Guilt was a useless emotion. It didn’t right wrongs. Didn’t undo what was done. All it did was weigh a person down.
Where to find holiness, Isaac didn’t rightly know, but it sure as hell didn’t come from answers. But questions—those were another matter. Ask a question, and an endless map of potential unfurls before you. North, south, east, west, an interstate of unknowings, each with their own exits and truck stops and bends in the road.
Traumatic memories do grow stronger on the date of the event; it’s called the Anniversary Effect.
But all it takes is one survivor, and the story lives on. One survivor to carry the poems and the
songs, the prayers, the sorrows. It isn’t just taking a life that destroys a people. It’s taking their history.
What happens when the walls we raise outlive the dangers they were built to keep out? At what point does a fort become a cage?
