A Court of Silver Flames (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #4)

by Sarah J. Maas

So Nesta had become a wolf. Armed herself with invisible teeth and claws, and learned to strike faster, deeper, more lethally. Had relished it. But when the time came to put away the wolf, she’d found it had devoured her, too.

That line hits something deep in me. The idea of becoming a wolf to survive — of building teeth and claws out of pain just to make it through — feels all too familiar. I know what it’s like to turn your hurt into armor, to mistake survival for healing. Like Nesta, I learned to fight so hard that I forgot how to stop, and by the time I looked up, the wolf had already devoured me too. There’s something both terrifying and beautiful in that realization — that sometimes the very thing that saves us also destroys parts of who we were.

Wished someone would cut the damned thing from her chest. Wished someone would smother the voice that whispered of every horrible thing she had ever done, every awful thought she’d had, every person she’d failed. She had been born wrong. Had been born with claws and fangs and had never been able to keep from using them, never been able to quell the part of her that roared at betrayal, that could hate and love more violently than anyone ever understood. Elain had been the only one who perhaps grasped it, but now her sister loathed her. She didn’t know how to fix it. How to make any of it right. How to stop being this way.

Living with that kind of self-hatred — the kind that eats at you because you can’t quite understand why you are the way you are — drags you into a darkness that feels endless. Nesta embodies that pain so vividly it almost hurts to read. And as someone who sees so much of myself in her, I can only hope she finds the thing that finally quiets the storm inside her. That moment of clarity where she begins to not just understand herself, but accept and even love the parts she once feared — the shadows, the sharp edges, all of it.

“I can’t bear to be in my head. I can’t bear to hear and see everything, over and over. That is all I hear—the snapping of his neck. His last words to me. That he loved me.” She whispered, “I didn’t deserve that love. I deserve nothing.”

I know that ache of being trapped in your own mind, where every memory feels like it’s echoing your unworthiness. Even without her pain, I feel the weight of thinking you don’t deserve love—like your own thoughts are the sentence you can’t escape.

“That’s the key, isn’t it? To know the darkness will always remain, but how you choose to face it, handle it … that’s the important part. To not let it consume. To focus upon the good, the things that fill you with wonder.” She gestured to the stars zooming past. “The struggle with that darkness is worth it, just to see such things.”

There’s such quiet beauty in this realization—the truth Nesta has long refused to accept: the darkness will remain, yet she can still choose wonder. For someone so consumed by self-loathing, that acceptance feels like a fragile kind of grace. To struggle and still see the stars—that is the beginning of her salvation.