The Savior (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #17)

by J.R. Ward

The past was permanent in the same way the future was always just a hypothetical, two ends of a spectrum where one was concrete and the other air, and the instantaneous now, the single real moment, was the fixed point from which the weight of life hung and swung.

Past Future Present

said about emotions. You weren’t responsible for them and you couldn’t control them, but you were in charge of your response to them.

Emotions

“When do we ever know what we’re walking into,” he said in a low voice. “Destiny is not a straightaway. It’s cluttered with corners and all of them are dark. We make the turns we do . . . and find ourselves where we are.”

Whats destiny

If you were loved, if you had people who cared about you, you could be by yourself and never feel alone. But if no one cared? You were isolated even in a crowd.

Nobody knows

friends. Some were in your life for a season. Some were in your life for a reason. And then there was, of course, the third grouping: The lifelong relationships that you carried through all seasons and all reasons.

Friends

Great loss, like death, required time to become real. The brain needed to get trained in the absence, the never again, the there-but-now-gone. Emotions, after all, could be so strong that they could warp reality—not in the sense that mourning could resurrect what had been lost, but more like grief could sharpen recollection to such painful degrees that it was as if you could call the person to you, touch them . . . hold them. The brain had to learn to accept the new reality.

Dealing with loss