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How lost do you have to be to let the devil lead you home? This lost, I decide. Precisely this lost.
Anger’s solid; it has weight. You can beat your fists against it. Pity’s a fog to become lost within.
whatever faith I once possessed, but the entire endeavor feels like foolishness. My religion has abandoned me along with everything else.
Brown hair, brown eyes, and no chin to speak of. I’m any face in a crowd; just the Lord’s way of filling in the gaps.
How many injustices will I allow to walk by before I pluck up the courage to intervene?
For the first time since I woke up this morning, I feel a yearning for my old life. I miss knowing these men. I miss the intimacy of this friendship.
“I loathe getting to know people, so whenever I meet somebody I like, I just assume a friendship immediately. It saves a great deal of time in the long run.”
“Well, what else would you call a second chance?” she asks. “You don’t like the man you were. Very well. Be somebody else. There’s nothing stopping you, not anymore. As I said, I envy you. The rest of us are stuck with our mistakes.”
“What does a child who has everything want?” More, just like everybody else.
Wealth is poisonous to the soul, and my parents have been wealthy a very long time—as have most of the guests who will be at this party. Their manners are a mask; you’d do well to remember that.”
The thought is almost enough to turn me around by the shoulders, but I cannot confront the person I was by running from the life he built. Better to make a stand here, confident of whom I wish to become.
Nothing like a mask to reveal somebody’s true nature.
“That’s how you know who you are. You don’t just remember it—you do it, and you keep doing it.”
Dance hates people who try to deceive him, considering it a suggestion of gullibility, of stupidity. To even attempt it, liars must believe themselves to be cleverer than the person they’re lying to, an assumption he finds grotesquely insulting.
The truth is you’ve yet to be tested, but that’s coming, and if you’ve changed, truly changed, then who knows, there may be hope for you.”
“We are never more ourselves than when we think people aren’t watching.
Too little information and you’re blind, too much and you’re blinded.
The Plague Doctor claimed Blackheath was meant to rehabilitate us, but bars can’t build better men and misery can only break what goodness remains. This place pinches out the hope in people, and without that hope, what use is love or compassion or kindness?
Instead of the impossible, I’ll need only concern myself with the ordinary. The luxury of waking up in the same bed two days in a row or being able to reach the next village should I choose. The luxury of sunshine. The luxury of honesty. The luxury of living a life without a murder at the end of it.
Tomorrow can be whatever I want it to be, which means for the first time in decades, I can look forward to it. Instead of being something to fear, it can be a promise I make myself. A chance to be braver or kinder, to make what was wrong right. To be better than I am today. Every day after this one is a gift. I just have to keep walking until I get there.
