The Host (The Host, #1)

by Stephenie Meyer

planet called Earth was as peaceful and serene as it looked from space, invitingly green and blue, wreathed in its harmless white vapors. As was the way of the soul, harmony was universal now.

Souls did not, as a rule, speak anything but the truth.

Storytelling was the most honored of all talents, for it benefited everyone.

“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.

“After all I’ve seen, if I hadn’t learned compassion, I wouldn’t be worth much.

I’d never lived on a planet where such atrocities could happen, even before the souls came. 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.

Been together so long that the skin on their fingers grew in ridges around their wedding rings. They were holding hands, and he kissed her on her cheek, and she blushed under all those wrinkles.

So great was his compassion, he seemed to bleed internally with it.

“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.”

Because these humans could hate with so much fury, was the other end of the spectrum that they could love with more heart and zeal and fire?

After all, what was more important, in the end, than love? To a soul, wasn’t that the heart of everything? And love would have been my answer.