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She knew that love could swaddle you tight, and also bruise.
I will love you like the ocean loves the sand.
No one is all bad. No one is all good. We live as equals in the murky gray between.
Two connected things must always come apart.
who I am—my goodness or my badness—it’s fluctuating. Morality is not fixed. It’s fluid, ever-changing.
Sometimes you are certain this is all you are made of: a fleeting instant between action and inaction. Doing something, or not. Where is the difference, you wonder? Where is the choice. Where is the line, between stillness and motion?
The horrible thing that leads to the good.
You can do the vilest thing. It’s not so hard, to be bad. Evil isn’t something you can pinpoint or hold, cradle or banish. Evil hides, sly and invisible, in the corners of everything else.
time could be a knife. Lodged already, just waiting to twist. As
Sometimes life has a way of telling you where you belong,
Her very soul.
There was nothing like the love you had for your own child. It was biological. Primal and evolutionary. It was chronic, unbanishable. It had been living inside her all this time. Bone-deep.
The very nature of love’s suffering makes the concept impossible. No one thing can be wholly good, can it?”
Pointless pain isn’t human instinct. We’ll always find meaning in it.
What part of your child self feels at home in trauma?
Lavender knew, then, that the world was a forgiving place. That every horror she had lived or caused could be balanced with such gutting kindness. It would be a tragedy, she thought—inhumane—if we were defined only by the things we left behind.
You don’t need to have it all. You only need to figure out how much is enough.
There is good and there is evil, and the contradiction lives in everyone.
