More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
All men can love a forbidden thing, generally speaking, and in most cases knowledge is precisely that; lost knowledge even more so.
Beware the man who faces you unarmed. If in his eyes you are not the target, then you can be sure you are the weapon.
Really, there was nothing more dangerous than a woman who knew her own worth.
A uniquely upsetting curse, really, how little he knew how to exist when she wasn’t there; his only source of pleasure was knowing she probably felt the same whenever she could bring herself to stomach the admission.
Maybe after a lifetime of being useless, Tristan simply wanted to be used.
Being desired was Callum’s favorite. That was smoky, too, in a sense, but more sultry, cloaked and perfumed in precisely what it was. It smelled like tangled bedsheets. It tasted like the flicker of a candle flame. It felt like a sigh, a quiet one; concessionary and pleading. He could always feel it on his skin, sharp as a blade. Piercing, like the groan of a lover in his ear.
“No one here is good. Knowledge is carnage. You can’t have it without sacrifice.”
“A flaw of humanity,” said Parisa, shrugging as they walked. “The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable sameness.”
After all, if we could all have boundless, fulfilling sex whenever we liked, why would we ever bother with monogamy? Stigma like yours keeps you subjugated, you know,”
“But the moment we realize we can feel fulfilled without carrying the burdens of belonging to another—that we can experience rapture without being someone’s other half, and therefore beholden to their weaknesses, to their faults and failures and their many insufferable fractures—then we’re free, aren’t we?”
What was being human except to crave things unreasonably?
“You are not accustomed to being desired, are you?”
The day you are not a fire,” he said, “is the day the earth will fall still for me.”
