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But above all else, Atlas Blakely is just a man.
(Was this really the life she’d meant to chase, or was this just another way to run?)
The problem is that it was not romantic, not platonic, not fraternal. The problem is that it was closest to alchemical—the feeling like you’ve met the person you want to make magic with for the rest of your life.
“You don’t have to lie to protect me,” Nico said. “And you don’t have to keep any secrets just to keep me.”
I truly, deeply, fucking hate you I know right!!! lmao same
Maybe her only purpose was to survive, which was fucking difficult, and so maybe that was enough.
This was it, the chronic condition—the only meaning Parisa had left in life. It wasn’t a secret society, it wasn’t an ancient library, it wasn’t an experiment that had taken two decades to design, it was waking up every fucking morning and deciding to keep going. The tiny, unceremonious, incomparable miracle of making it through another goddamn day. The knowledge that life was mean and it was exacting. It was cruel and it was cursed; it was recalcitrant and precious. It was always ending. But it did not have to be earned.
though Nico wasn’t entirely sure what the alternative to wasting away in academia was supposed to be. Wasting away in bureaucracy? In heterosexuality? In his brunch khakis?
That is the duality of man, in a way. A person can see everything and nothing all at once.)
How many times and how silently could a woman actually die?
What had they been orbiting for so long, if not the inevitability of what they could be?
she understood that nothing in the universe was purely ugly without something beautiful; nothing wholly good without the shadow of something bad.
Loving someone was not enough. You gave and you gave and you gave and sometimes, as was the way of things, that love did not come back, or even if it did, it died young.
He would simply live with the providence of it—the sacred proffering of shame.
We are given exactly as much time as we need to be as human as we are, and that’s it.
of knowing fear will never really leave you and still there are no other options, no other choices, because to love something is to care for it, to glimpse everything you will someday lose and still go on as if that loss will not destroy you.
the stranger turned the opposite way on the path, disappearing into the thin crowd that had begun to arrive, busy city-dwellers who’d looked up from their phones, from their personal pains and their busy lives, all for a fleeting glimpse of Reina’s spring.
To live at all was to watch something die.
Humanity did not want to change. It did not deserve it.
People looked at a miracle and thought wow, if only it were something else.
it is the projection of alternative realities, the thing that some people call regret and others call wonder. The thing that anyone who has ever looked at the stars has come to observe.
You’d like to think it’s more romantic, wouldn’t you? Life and death, meaning and existence, purpose and power, the weight of the world.
We are stardust on earth, we are impossible beings—
The world as you believe it to exist is not a thing. The world is not an idea, something to be made or exalted or saved. It is an ecosystem of other people’s pain, a chorus of other people’s street foods, the variety of magic that people can make with the same set of chords. The world is pretty simple, in the end.
The answer, of course—the answer that took me three books to write—is that the world is not ending. The world will live on. We mythologize ourselves, it’s what we do as humans, but ultimately we are expendable.
