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He preached theirs was not a vengeful god, and Saint fought the urge to ask why the fuck not.
“Okay is the preserve of the uninspired, Patchwork. I’d rather live and die at the extremes than exist in the middle.”
“Sometimes the only way to heal a wound is to tear a bigger one in the person that hurt you.”
She wondered if she would always straddle that confusing place between child and adult, if it was printed on her skin like a warning that she could not be depended on or desired.
Dinner with her parents loomed like an eighteen-wheeler on the narrowest highway.
We’ll exist at the extremes because the middle is where the healthy pass their time.”
Patch wondered if hope was its own kind of punishment, sometimes worse than certainty, than the long and closed-off road toward healing.
Her grandmother told her first love was the most terminal of ailments.
Noble acts…they don’t always end anyplace good.
He read newspapers in bus seatbacks, saw color photos of troops too young being sent to a place they could not pick out on a world map, fought under a sun entirely foreign, against an enemy they would train hard not to understand.
If you learn from the times you go wrong, you can revel in the times you don’t.”
He was the kind of boy who would become the kind of man that needed tending.
“When it comes to marriage, love is merely a visitor over a lifetime. Respect and kindness, they are the true foundations.
She would play that moment back and wonder at a universal network of fate, each decision rippling out from the wings of a butterfly, searching a grid of pattern that had been laid in another life.
Someone once told him that the bad things no longer matter if you choose not to repeat them. But as he saw the first clusters of children ease into their day, he knew second chances were the hardest earn, sometimes beyond reach no matter how much you willed and pushed.
He just cried in a way that was difficult to witness, an unraveling of a story he had held inside so tightly and for so long.
Saint knew love, she knew it was sewn into the smallest gestures, the kindnesses barely perceived. And she knew it was responsible for the largest and darkest acts, the sacrifices and the rawest pain.
