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We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrary things—of diverse tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, sprightly and solemn: the musician who should only affect some of these, what would he be able to do? he must know how to make use of them all, and to mix them; and so we should mingle the goods and evils which are consubstantial with our life; our being cannot subsist without this mixture, and the one part is no less necessary to it than the other. —Michel de Montaigne, Essays
One gossips about one’s acquaintance, not one’s friends,
He wished he could have shown the words to someone, but he knew it was impossible. It had felt good to write it all down, anyway,
a line from Dante’s Inferno: from MIDWAY UPON THE JOURNEY OF LIFE, I FOUND MYSELF WITHIN A FOREST DARK to THERE IS NO GREATER SORROW THAN TO RECALL IN MISERY THE TIME WHEN WE WERE HAPPY.
“As with all the best stories, some of it is true.”
“We who are already dead. We are the lucky ones.”
“You and I are the same,” he said. “We are sick in our souls from old wounds.
“I speak,” Jesse said calmly, “when I have something to say.”
“Mine is a complicated story, and people do not want to hear complicated stories. They want simple stories, in which people are either good or evil, and no one good ever makes a mistake, and no one evil ever repents.”
It is because of me that you have become what you are. Hard and bright as a diamond. Untouchable.
“You shall be as independent as you wish.
He understood now why poets damned their hearts, their capacity for desolation and want.
His mind had told him that his heart was broken, but he had not felt it, not felt all the jagged pieces of shattered hope, like shards of glass inside his chest.
How were the people he loved the most in the world the ones he seemed to know the least?
Yet when she speaks of what was done to you, my silent heart cries out: this was wrong, it was always wrong.
You love as your father loves: wholly, without conditions or hesitancy. To use that as a weapon is blasphemy.
Whose hearts must I break? What lie must I maintain? Through whose blood am I to wade?
We become what we are afraid we will be, Layla.
“We are not here just to forget,” Matthew said, “but also to remember that there are good and beautiful things in this world, always. And mistakes do not take them from us; nothing takes them from us. They are eternal.”
“Do you think I don’t understand what it is to have made a wrong decision, believing you were making the right one? Do you think anyone could imagine what that is like better than I could?”
I was wrong about my marriage. I didn’t think it was real. It was real. The most real thing in my life. He had told her he loved her. It was all she thought she had ever wanted. But she found now that it rang hollow in her heart.
neither of them had left their troubles behind. They had only carried those troubles along with them.
what does Dickens say? ‘Against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.’”
Matthew shrugged. “I am nothing if not predictable.”
She was not the same person she had been then, she thought,
Dreams, hopes, wishes, were just that. Strength lay in keeping tight hold of reality, even if it was like grasping a stinging nettle in her hand.
Dramatics, he’d said in a bored tone, but the sympathy in his eyes when he looked at her was genuine.
“Daisy—” he started. “Don’t,” she said, softly, looking at the Institute gates with their Latin script, PULVIS ET UMBRA SUMUS. “Don’t call me that.”
“I would not be pitied. Not by anyone.” In that, we are alike, James wanted to say; he couldn’t bear to tell anyone about the bracelet, the spell. Couldn’t bear to be pitied over what Grace had done to him. He had intended to tell Cordelia, but he had imagined a very different sort of reunion for them.
That heart’s delight, one single glance the nerves to frenzy wrought, one single glance bewildered every thought.… Layla, she was called.
“I used to think that it was most important to endure, to stay strong. But unhappiness, over time… it poisons your life.”
But you cannot fix someone, Cordelia,” she added. “In the end, if they can be fixed at all, they must do the repairs themselves.”
“We are all wrong sometimes,” he said. “We all make mistakes.”
“How much love people have denied themselves through the ages because they believed they did not deserve it. As if the waste of love is not the greater tragedy.”
“I know,” he said, “but sometimes we leave people to protect ourselves, don’t we? Not because we don’t want to be with them.
“We are all flawed creatures. As diamonds are flawed, each distinct imperfection makes us unique.”
James had noticed this was Jesse’s way generally: he tended to be quiet and offer thoughts rarely, but when he did, they cut to the heart of things.
“There’s always hope for people, Jesse,” Tessa said. “No one is a lost cause, not even your mother.”
She was living in a sort of limbo, not quite here or there, a space where she did not yet have to make a firm decision.
“My Lucie,” he breathed. “You know it’s the people who we love the most who can hurt us the most.”
“It’s not dramatic.” As if mesmerized, Jesse trailed his fingers along her cheek, to her lips. He touched her mouth with his fingertips, and she saw his eyes darken. “That’s how I feel when I am away from you.”
“I dreamed of this,” he said. “Of being able to touch you. Really touch you. I could always only half feel you—and I imagined what it would be like—I tortured myself with it—” “Is it like what you thought?” Lucie whispered. “I think it might break me,” he said, and stretched out above her. “You might break me, Lucie,” and he drove his mouth against hers, hot and demanding.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
He was the same, and yet different—she did not remember such curious eyes or such a wry, thoughtful turn to his mouth.
“The tears of a woman,” she’d said, “are one of the few sources of her power. They should not be freely shed any more than a warrior should throw his sword into a river. If you are to shed tears, you should know, from the first, your purpose in doing so.”
“His state of mind is that he loves you. He loves you and he mourns that love as impossible. He fears that you despise him, that everyone does. That is his state of mind, and it is a difficult one indeed.”
And when I see James looking at Grace, I see nothing at all. But when I see him looking at you, he is transformed.
We all carry a light inside ourselves. It burns with the flame of our souls. But there are other people in our lives who add their own flames to ours, creating a brighter conflagration.”
“You must stop thinking about it that way,” Cordelia said. “You’re not failing me, you’re not failing your family. You’re failing yourself.”
“I am not sure we choose who we love,” said Cordelia, turning toward the door. “I rather think love is something like a book written just for us, a sort of holy text it is given to us to interpret.” She paused in the doorway, looking back over her shoulder. “And you are refusing to read yours.”
