The Burning White (Lightbringer, #5)

by Brent Weeks

You can take that tragedy and wrap yourself up in it like a blanket to keep you feeling warm and self-righteous, because this world done you wrong.

So you can stay in this shit, or you can climb out, too. And I’m sorry to say it, but I don’t have a rope to throw you or a key to offer. Climbing out will be tougher than it would be to tell yourself what a noble martyr you are and live half a life, cuddled up with your misery. But you’re making a choice, like it or not. This isn’t happening to you.

“I kin understand it when a man throws back a few too many drinks on a lonesome night, gets sour inside, and sucks at the teat of a musket for jus’ long enough so that big ole ‘fuck you’ we scream at the world bounces back as ‘fuck me’ and he pulls the trigger. I kin understand when a girl climbs a tree and tries on a noose necklace for size and once she got it on thinkin’, ‘I come this far, why not?’ and takin’ that hop. Prob’ly e’ryone who looks oft a cliff thinks a taking the sharp drop with a sudden stop. E’ery sailor has thought of takin’ that swim what fattens sharks. We all got the black moment when the evil eye of the barrel dares a starin’ contest. And we’re all a hair trigger’s pull from the musket’s dare. It’s the devil’s gift, ain’t it? It’s the heritage o’ man, aye?”

They’d been field dressings on a gaping wound of purposelessness.

But all our lives are wax, and time itself is heat unbearable, and every day we melt—but some of us take flame!

Human grief and human love and every species of human bonds and heart connections had floated at her fingertips, sometimes pushing in, sometimes waiting for her to reach out her hands and pull them to her once more. She’d been pushing it all away for the last year, and now as if by long practice her muscles of rejection had grown immensely strong, her humanity flown far from her.

Fear is a tortoise; its jaws will snap you clean in half if you let it—but it’ll only catch you if you don’t move,

the awesome beauty of the stars was Orholam’s gift to everyone, whereas a torch in the city was a selfish tool for one or two. One should weigh carefully whether the work you did by that light benefited the community more than the beauty you stole from them to do it.

But given time, horror fades, and repetition makes what was unthinkable now normal; the monstrous is made manageable. For mankind adapts to every horror.