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She could feel herself hurtling toward self-awareness, and she wasn’t sure she liked it.
The problem with pursuing bad feelings was that it was always difficult to tell if one was running toward a problem to fix it, or running to a problem to create it.
“It was easier to tell hero from villain when the stakes were only life and death. Everything in between gets harder.”
“Here is what I have learned,” Henry said. “If you cannot be unafraid —” There was a place where terror stopped and became nothingness. But today, in this hole, with an insect on his skin, with a promise that he was to die soon, the nothingness never came. Henry finished, “— be afraid and happy. Think of your child bride, Gansey, and the times we had last night. Think about what you are afraid of. That weight that tells you it is a bee? Does it have to be something that kills you? No. It is just a little thing. It could be anything. It could be something beautiful instead.”
Blue was filled with frustration that her life was so clearly demarcated.
Things that were not enough, but that she could have. Things that were something more, that she couldn’t.
It was impossible how some memories never decayed.
“I think,” Gansey said slowly, “that it’s about being honest with yourself. That’s all you can do.”
“I stopped asking how. I just did it. The head is too wise. The heart is all fire.”
In the end, it was such a simple, small thing. He had felt flashes of it before in his life, the absolute certainty. But the truth was that he’d kept walking away from it. It was a far more terrifying idea to imagine how much control he really had over how his life turned out. Easier to believe that he was a gallant ship tossed by fate than to captain it himself.
He would steer it now, and if there were rocks near shore, so be it.
If you can’t be unafraid, Henry said, be afraid and happy.
