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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Most strong things are rigid. If you are water, you can shift to fit any mold and freeze yourself strong. You can be strong in any shape. You can be anything.”
“I like how I can feel the sun simmering on the horizon even before it comes into view. I like the moment it lights up the fog and then burns through it. That brightness reminds me that there’s a world beyond this mountain, beyond Kaigen. No matter how cold the nights get here, the sun is rising somewhere. Somewhere, it’s making someone warm.”
You learn over time that the world isn’t broken. It’s just… got more pieces to it than you thought. They all fit together, just maybe not the way you pictured when you were young.”
listening never made any man dumber, but it’s made a lot of people smarter.”
“A life of dangerous adventures might seem worth it now, when you are young and seemingly invincible, but one day, you will have children, and you will not want that life for them.”
there were certainly people in those stories who knew what they were fighting for, heroes who were noble and strong-willed and worth remembering. Like you. But I wasn’t one of them. Sirawu was just that: a shadow. It was someone else’s story, and I was just passing through it. This… you were my story… and I was so selfish, so tied to that shadow that I missed it. My son, I— I’m so sorry it took me this long to understand. I’m sorry—”
“The thing is, you’re more important than all of them. So, what I couldn’t do for my parents, or Robin, or Takeru, or my unborn babies, I’ll do it for you. My son, I’ll do it for you. You’ve done more in this world than anyone could have asked. This once, let me be the mother I should have been from the beginning. Let me take care of the rest, all right?”
No one officially named her, but the village, in their whispers, called her Kazeko, Wind Child, for the terrible thing that had brought her into their midst.
“But if I learned one thing from Firebird, it’s that a person’s tragedy doesn’t define them or cancel all the good in their life.
Wholeness, she had learned, was not the absence of pain but the ability to hold it.
