Security

by Gina Wohlsdorf

He told the landscape architect that romantic serenades are the secret to growing flawless red roses; fragile flowers need to know they’re loved.

Tessa is an ambulant contradiction. She is at once strikingly strong and heartrendingly vulnerable. The paradox makes a natural protector desperate to protect her.

Most people are fantastically readable. That’s why masks are a great idea for killers.

It’s a sad thing to be the slave of your art, but it is the only way to truly create. Making the world new requires leaving the old world behind and drifting alone in a space devoid of perspective. It drives men—pardon me, people—to terrible extremes. Extremes of beauty, of ugliness.

Define “take care of.” To watch over. To concern oneself with. To worry about, even when the object of one’s care isn’t interested in one’s care.

The secret to anything is to decide. Anything is surmountable. Anything.

Death is not something many people think about—at least outside of religious dogma—and of those who think, few are capable of arriving at a conclusion that is anything but cynical, and so what Tessa has somehow done—and Brian, it seems, has done it, too—is to refuse to arrive at a conclusion, but instead to insist on honesty and forthrightness at the expense of sweetness.

Seconds are not sloppy, necessarily. Some things are better left over; everyone knows that. Lasagna, for example.

It is easy to be nice when being nice is easy, but niceness is the first thing to go when an unexamined life becomes even slightly difficult.

People begin failing tests they never realized they’re taking. People get pills; people get mistresses. They get angry at grand injustices they created for themselves, and they created those injustices in an effort to ignore the fundamental, foundational injustice that being alive means living in the shadow of death. It strikes them—these blessed children—as horribly unfair.