The Host (The Host, #1)

by Stephenie Meyer

In so many millennia, the humans never did figure love out. How much is physical, how much in the mind? How much accident and how much fate? Why did perfect matches crumble and impossible couples thrive? I don’t know the answers any better than they did. Love simply is where it is.

This place was truly the highest and the lowest of all worlds—the most beautiful senses, the most exquisite emotions… the most malevolent desires, the darkest deeds. Perhaps it was meant to be so. Perhaps without the lows, the highs could not be reached.

What if it were you? How would you feel if you were Melanie? What if you were the one… invaded that way? What if you were trapped, and someone else was telling your body what to do? If you couldn’t speak for yourself? Wouldn’t you want your wishes—as much as they could be known—respected? At the very least by other humans?”

“But what if it were you?” Ian asked in little more than a whisper. “What if you were stuffed in a human body and let loose on this planet, only to find yourself lost among your own kind? What if you were such a good… person that you tried to save the life you’d taken, that you almost died trying to get her back to her family? What if you then found yourself surrounded by violent aliens who hated you and hurt you and tried to murder you, over and over again?” His voice faltered momentarily. “What if you just kept doing whatever you could to save and heal these people despite that? Wouldn’t you deserve a life, too? Wouldn’t you have earned that much?”

“It’s not the face, but the expressions on it. It’s not the voice, but what you say. It’s not how you look in that body, but the things you do with it. You are beautiful.”

Happy and sad, elated and miserable, secure and afraid, loved and denied, patient and angry, peaceful and wild, complete and empty… all of it. I would feel everything. It would all be mine.

Perhaps there could be no joy on this planet without an equal weight of pain to balance it out on some unknown scale.

She doesn’t know I’m here, but someday—someday soon—I will tell her about this moment. I’ll tell her that I didn’t want my body back until I knew I could use it to protect her.

There is no one in my head but me. So of course I feel horribly alone.

“I wondered if anyone who really knew her could not love her. You knew her every thought.” “Yes.” I answer the question he didn’t ask. “I love her.”

She thinks of you as her anchor. You gave her a reason to finally stay in one place after a lifetime of wandering.”