More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
PERSONS OF INTEREST
The burnings were a fine reminder of something Gideon had learned long ago: there is doom to be found everywhere if doom is what you seek.
In the end, the pitfall and the providence of knowing Nico de Varona was that he could not be readily forgotten, nor easily parted from. Missing him was like missing a severed limb. Never quite complete and never whole, though on occasion the vestigial aches proved helpfully informative.
(If you do not know precisely where impossibility begins and ends, then of course it cannot constrain you.)
If power is a thing to be had, it must be capable of possession. But power is not any discrete size or weight. Power is continuous. Power is parabolic. Say you are given some power, which then increases your capacity to accumulate more power. Your capacity for power increases exponentially in relation to the actual power you have gained. Thus, to gain power is to be increasingly powerless.
If the more power one has, the less one has, then is it the thing or are you?
Without Libby for a counterweight, there was nothing to temper his recklessness. Nothing to anchor him at all.
His only application of what he had learned of her selfhood was being used to preserve his own ego, to service his own strengths.
one thing Parisa had come to learn was that other people’s view of her said far more about them than it ever did about her.
Reina Mori had not yet realized that people had a maddening tendency to be precisely what they were in the most unpredictable, erratic way possible.
some baseline limitation. It was all very simple, really, that one could not create something out of nothing—and likewise, one could not create nothing out of something.
It was Callum who had been in pieces, not that anyone else would ever know or care.
“Do you think they know what it really means to love?” his projection-self mused aloud to him. “That it isn’t the simple joy of fondness, I mean. In fact it’s violent, destructive. It means to cut the heart out of your chest and give it to someone else.”
The trick was managing it until it no longer bit so angrily or stung.
“And the more human something is,” he murmured, “the weaker it is.”
Something about Libby’s absence had ripped a hole in the fabric of Nico’s reality, allowing little unforeseen vulnerabilities to spill
“Schopenhauer’s will to live states that there is something innate in each of us. Something like self-preservation, which essentially comes to fruition in moments of impending death.”
Murder first and then scholarly pursuits.
Elizabeth Rhodes, destroyer of worlds. The thought alone made her crave a doughnut, or perhaps some sort of custardy pie.
There we go, Rhodes, now you’re thinking. Not everything is a matter of vast physicalities. More often everything comes down to the fundamental weakness of a single human being. Do you even know how many fractures a person can contain? Look at your own faults and don’t be stupid. You’re not special because you’re flawed, everyone has broken pieces. Everyone has something to hide.
Did you know that most of our behaviors come from our adolescence? Tastes evolve, but there’s a particular slice of youth that never leaves us. They’re called our formative years for a reason. Because we always return to them in some form.
How else could one possibly face the prospect of being one-sixth of a dystopian nuclear code if not to simply laugh and go back to sleep?
We can’t help clinging to our origins, Callum said. The past always seems more ordered, Rhodes. It always seems clearer, more straightforward, easier to understand. We have a craving for it, that sense of simplicity, but only an idiot would ever chase the past, because our perception of it is false—it was never that the world was simple. Just that in retrospect it could be known, and therefore understood.
“The future is so messy,” remarked Callum. “So disordered. So many outcomes. Entropy only moves in one direction, have you ever thought about that? Like heat.” He bounced a small rubber ball three times, watching it disappear. “Did you see that? Of course you didn’t.”
If things weren’t working, make them worse.
were, mistook for something human: A will. Fate. A plan. The universe through Tristan’s eyes would be orderly—and that, more than anything, was the closest thing Nico could imagine to omnipotence. It was as close to divine as anything could possibly be.
“O cherished archives, beloved minions of the Library on High, blessed by the Goddess Herself—”
People always craved power—that was a constant of humanity, a truer rule than any law of physics. If they weren’t given power, they took it. And however lofty and moral their foundational creed, people historically did not choose to give it away.
It suddenly seemed intensely shameful that despite all the power in the world, the only thing Reina truly wanted was to hide.
This was just the world. You trusted people, you loved them, you offered them the dignity of your time and the intimacy of your thoughts and the frailty of your hope and they either accepted it and cared for it or they rejected it and destroyed it and in the end, none of it was up to you. This was just what you got. Heartbreak was inevitable. Disappointment assured.
“to not be perfectly aware that you and I had something rare and difficult and fucking significant, and in the end it only broke because I broke
“Just because information exists doesn’t mean that people will act on it. Isn’t that the point? You can say things all you want,” she pointed out, “but it doesn’t mean people will believe it.”
In Libby’s mind, something horrifying turned, not unlike a key in a latch. Something, for Libby Rhodes, unlocked. Perhaps it was cruelty. Or necessity. Because the truth, as Libby could now see, was that Belen was actually not much of anything.
was this perhaps reverse racism? Didn’t all lives matter? Perhaps these smaller island nations should simply embrace recycling as a way of life. Or eat less meat! The carbon footprint of meat was really something. And really, at this point, weren’t we all equally well-informed, given the philanthropic measures taken toward global transparency?
Libby Rhodes, you bitch. I miss you and I hate you.
“You’re confusing Atlas with the Bible,”
“Did you see my research?” Nico asked, sounding more Rhodes-like than ever.
“No. What I think is that there is a blueprint to our lives, Ezra. And I think we chose the wrong paths, you and I.”
“She’s your true error, Ezra. Your biggest mistake was not in leading her here, to me, but in allowing her to become dangerous.
knowledge is a fucking curse. Knowledge is nothing,