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Could even that moment have been the product of something begun days, weeks, even lifetimes prior?
Did it matter where it started, and would it matter where it would end? Either yes, it mattered very much, because everything was a consequence of something and therefore what became of them was somehow predetermined, or no, it did not matter at all, because beginnings and endings were not as important as the moments that could have happened or the outcomes that might have been.
“You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today.”
THE NARRATOR: Foreshadowing, baby!
love this narrator
People were always thinking about what to do next. Other people were always planning their futures, moving ahead, and only Regan seemed to notice how the whole thing was just moving in circles.
he loves her the same way she loves art, which Regan considers a pleasing form of irony. Because even when you know everything about how a piece is made, you’re still only seeing the surface.
When you learn a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The mind comforts itself by believing this to be coincidence but it isn’t—it’s ignorance falling away. Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.
there was a sliver of space between him and the outside world and she had unassumingly filled it,
he’d stuck in her brain a little bit, embedding himself there like a thorn. Like something on the tip of her tongue or hovering just at the edge of her periphery.
That I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all of your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spidery palms, and still feel empty-handed.
“I—” Don’t hold hands with anyone ever again.
Oh Im squealing
There was nothing worse than being predictable. Nothing smaller than feeling ordinary. Nothing more disappointing than being reminded she was both.
this night is stolen, I want grand larceny and this is petty theft.
You asked too much of me, she thought to say. You wanted more from me than I am even worth.
“I started painting again.”
“He wants to know why I don’t come to bed.” The doctor blinked, taken aback a second time. How mundane, Regan thought disdainfully. How small your concerns. How very little the scope of your understanding. “And why don’t you?” “Because I’m painting.” It’s obvious, don’t you see it, can’t you hear it? His name is written on my skin, he scarred me, I’ve changed my entire shape for having fit within the enormity of his thoughts, and now the only words I know are lines and color.
“The idea that I might have options or other time-spaces to occupy is a little overwhelming.”
He thinks: The Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.
Empires have fallen like this, he thinks,
The first time they fight, she knows she loves him because she has never been worth the fight before.
he doesn’t want to be the person she hides from, he wants to be the person she hides with.
this and this and this.
soa flashbacks
I want you to say everything, anything. I want to have your thoughts, I want to bottle them, I want to put them in my drawer for safekeeping.
I came to look at art, to marvel at something, and here you are and so I will.
That to love a person was to forfeit the need to place limits on them, and therefore to love was to exist in a constant, paralyzing threat.
I think you need me more than you want me,
Whatever you are made of, Charlotte Regan, I am made of it, too.
to be alone without wonder or curiosity is to chip away any possible value we might discover in existing.”
she will keep turning corners until she finds him.
