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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.
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.
“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.”
“To care at all about anyone or anything means inevitably to suffer. After all, what is compassion?”
“You know, I like you like this,” she commented aloud. “The lack of fucks is so refreshing.”
she was the worst person she had ever known, and the least enjoyable to be trapped in a single room with.
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.
It was probably still nonsense, but it wasn’t the worst nonsense Callum had ever heard. He’d suffered far worse inside his head.
“He says my number one quality is my attention span and I should never let anyone tell me otherwise.”
Nothing was created or destroyed without some money changing hands.
There was no end to this world, no beginning, no salvation from on high, nor any need for it. Olympus was empty. The gods were already here.
Of course she loved. How else would she be riddled with holes like this if she were really so impermeable, so incapable of wounding?
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.
Destiny was a choice. Time to torch this outcome and let the fucker burn.
Olympus was empty and so was hell. The devils were all here, in this house.
