The Atlas Complex (The Atlas, #3)

by Olivie Blake

There was always a time when it seemed appropriate to voice one’s concerns, after which point doing so would only become increasingly unproductive. Naggy, in a sense.

Life was not a matter of saying yes once, on one significant but solitary occasion. Life was a series of difficult risings that followed impossible blows. To live was to experience a wide spectrum of terrible, destructive things, but only so often that the desire to make beneficial choices could still more frequently win out.

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.

Isn’t that all maturity is in the end? The gradual acceptance of personal idiocy?

but what was life if not a series of irresponsible choices in pursuit of shrieking joy?)

It was the piece that knew the hardest thing about existence was having a talent for causing suffering and declining to use it because it was bad. The piece that understood that success was not quantifiable by any form of capital. That it was most admirable to walk around in the world and choose not to break things just because you can.

But wanting things was not enough. 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. Sometimes you couldn’t save things, and the knowledge of it, the finality—the odd, horrifying satisfaction of the conclusion that nothing was in Gideon’s control except himself—was like a falling blade of certainty. Yet another heartbreak. Another goodbye.