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Instead I said, “You piss me off, you know that?” He chuckled bitterly. “I love you too.” It wasn’t the first time he’d said it in this life, but it might have been the last. “Even after the crossbow at Mount Fuji?” “Even after the crossbow at Mount Fuji. Right through the eye. Couldn’t do it again if you tried.” “Do you have a crossbow handy?”
New flowers from old roots, an eternal seed from which life will always bloom.
“I’ve never met anyone as ruthful as you,” Arden went on, as though he hadn’t heard me. I frowned. “Do you mean ruthless?” He shook his head vehemently. “Ruthful, the original. From the thirteenth century, or around then. How can you have forgotten? It means endless compassion, a deep empathy for others.” His jaw was taut and his gaze was urgent. “I hope you never lose that bottomless capacity for love. I hope you hold on to what makes you human.”
“What’s your secret, Evelyn? How does the candle of hope in your chest never burn down to the wick?” Gazing up at the phoenix sky, I searched myself for the answer, like running my fingers over an ancient map. “I think I understood a long time ago that big joy and small joy are the same. It sounds trite, but it’s true. Last year I won a major tennis tournament and brought home a huge cash prize for my family. I would’ve been on my way to the Championnat de France, if it weren’t for the war. Big joy. Really, really big joy. “But that victory felt no different from curling up in an old armchair
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“If a hero is someone who will give up love to save the world, then a villain is the reverse. Someone who will give up the world to save love.”
“It’s impossible to have bravery without fear. Bravery is picking up the fear and carrying it alongside you, rather than allowing it to block the path.”
“Confelicity— an English word with Latin roots—means a kind of vicarious happiness. You’ve always been so good at that. When you see other people happy, it makes you happy. Doesn’t matter who those people are, whether loved ones or perfect strangers. You just let their joy radiate through you, and it’s miraculous. I’ve never mastered it, really. Except with you. When you’re happy, I’m happy. And when you hurt, I hurt.”
“It’s overwhelming, loving like this,” I said weakly, my chest aching and aching. “My heart feels like an open wound. I don’t understand how everyone just … walks around with the knowledge that everyone they love will soon be dead. I look at my sister, my mum, and it’s all I can see. Inevitable loss. I look at them and I think, I love you so much, and we will one day lose each other forever, and I might die from the pain of it. So I try to pull myself back, to detach, to keep a healthy distance, like you do, but I can’t. I can’t.”
in the last thousand years: empires have risen and fallen and I have loved you, plagues have leaped from rat to daughter and I have loved you, humanity has conquered sea and sky and I have loved you, kings have been slain and forests razed and witches burned and gold struck and maps redrawn and fortunes traded and volcanoes erupted and moons landed and cathedrals sculpted and rivers dirtied and masterpieces painted and battlefields bloodied and I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.
To love was to live, and to live was to die.
