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Don’t confuse intensity of emotion with quality of emotion, baby, when I’d gotten tangled up with class heartbreaker Tommy Ralston. The more he’d hit on my girlfriends, the harder I’d worked to keep him. It was like I was addicted to whatever made me feel most intensely, even though it was hurting me. Pain is not love, Mac. Love makes you feel good.
“I want to go forward. And if you’re always looking over your shoulder, worrying about the next step you’re taking, you can’t. Hesitation kills.”
“Don’t lose yourself in anger, Mac. It’s gasoline. You can burn it as fuel, or you can use it to torch everything you care about and end up standing on a scorched battlefield, with everybody dead, even you—only your body doesn’t have the good grace to quit breathing.”
Strength wasn’t about being able to do everything alone. Strength was knowing when to ask for help and not being too proud to do it.
Life’s an ocean, full of waves. All are dangerous. All can drown you. Under the right circumstances, even the gentlest swell can turn tidal. Hopping waves is for the weekend warrior. Choose one, ride it out. It increases your odds of survival.”
Daddy told me once—when I’d said something about how perfect his relationship with Mom was—that I should have seen the first five years of their marriage, that they’d fought like hellions, crashed into each other like two giant stones. That eventually they’d eroded each other into the perfect fit, become a single wall, nestled into each other’s curves and hollows, her strengths chinking his weaknesses, her weaknesses reinforced by his strengths.
Fear translates to hesitation, and hesitation kills.
“Did he bother pointing out that everything the king had done, he’d done for her? Did she think of that before she decided to kill herself? Did it ever occur to her that sometimes a willingness to turn dark for someone else might just be a fucking virtue?”
It’s funny how, when things seem the darkest, moments of beauty present themselves in the most unexpected places.
The person who truly lives has precious few moments of safety, learns to thrive in any kind of storm.
He was the one who’d taught me that the heart had reasons of which reason knew nothing, the only quote of Pascal’s I remembered.
And I had to wonder: Was this the whole point? Was it about taking everything from me there was to take? Was that what life did? Made you lose everything you cared about and believed in, then killed you?
Some people are a force of nature. Like wind or water over stone, they reshape lives.
