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He would come to understand over time that most people were bored,
Books saved him. (What he hadn’t realized was that a person had saved him, because people, they wrote the books, the books themselves were just the tethers, the lifelines that dragged him back.
When an ecosystem dies, nature makes a new one. Don’t you get it? The world doesn’t end. Only we do.
in that moment, even though he doesn’t tell anyone what he’s thinking, which is this: I shouldn’t have asked for power when what I really wanted was meaning. But now he has both, so. You can see how we’re at an impasse.
“what else are you willing to break, Miss Rhodes, and who will you betray to do it?”
This book scares me...
Within every human being is the power to see the world as it is and still be driven to destroy it.
Left to their own devices, humans will inevitably care for one another at great detriment to themselves. Within every human being is the power to see the world as it is and still be compelled to save it. It is not one side or the other. Both are true. Flip the coin and see where it lands.
To him she was nothing, nothing more than an object, something to be used or fucked or destroyed. This was the world, she reminded herself.
“Dalton, I’m covered in blood.” “You wear it well,” he said. “Of course I do. But that doesn’t mean I like the outfit.”
Laughter, definitely laughter. It escaped her in something of a rueful bray. Unattractive, like a selfish woman. Ugly, like an ambitious one. Like one who chose to punish a good man for not being the right man, who left because staying was too boring, too painful, too hard. Like a woman who had to be a weapon because she couldn’t be anything else.
Everything is hard, mijo, to live is a challenge.
“Besides, white men are always in fashion. I’d be just as well off then as I would in any other situation.”
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.
What was anger except setting fire to the possibility of clarity? What would fury do aside from cloud her judgment?
Maybe she’d always been this angry; maybe now that she’d become aware of it, she’d never be unaware again.
To be perfectly clear, Atlas Blakely doesn’t want to destroy the universe. He just doesn’t want to exist in this one.
“The way I see it,” Ezra had told Atlas once, or at least as Atlas remembered it, “life has the capacity to be very long, and all the worst things are pretty much inevitable. So, you know, might as well rob the bank.”
The problem is also money, and most definitely capitalism. The problem is stolen knowledge! The problem is colonialism! The problem is institutional religion! The problem is corporate greed! The problem is entire populations forgoing equitable labor for the fleeting high of cheap consumer goods! The problem is generational! The problem is historical! The problem is the English! The problem is—)
Once the idea of death becomes necessary, even palatable, there is always someone the rest of the herd can stand to lose.
everything in the universe has a cost.
What was the reason for it, this existence so thin it could not be sliced in half, much less properly shared with another?
They’d observed mainly that Ezra was, not unlike Li, a shadow trying very hard to be a man.
(The lesser of two evils was rarely an Englishman or an American. That much any textbook could confirm.)
“What is magic if not the chance to supersede the laws of nature?
She is, however, the single member of her cohort who might have even a sliver of a chance at understanding what it is to recognize yourself as nothing more than the symbol of something in someone else’s mind. To realize that you are only the burden of another person’s ghosts.)
Life was a choice, a series of choices, destiny was saying yes, yes, yes until eventually, something happened. Something would have to happen. If nothing happened, then there was no meaning, no purpose. If nothing happened, then life was just a dead sister and some cheap high; five seconds of being valedictorian. It was just fucking over your girlfriend and setting off a pointless bomb and seeing yourself reflected, in all your spineless glory, in the mirrored sunglasses of a woman you’ll never speak to again.
We don’t get to undo our mistakes. We just make new ones and try to make the next ones more interesting
“They really think they’re the good guys,” she murmured. “Everyone does, Mori,” Callum muttered beside her. “Everyone does.”
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.
I think the point is to be surprised by people. It’s not to know them completely. It’s to see them in a new way all the time, always turning them over and finding something different, some new fascinating thing.
“I will spend my life orbiting yours,” Nico said, and the exhaustion in his voice, she knew it. She understood it. “I consider it a privilege. Does that mean less if we never sleep together? If we never have babies and hold hands, does that have to mean less? You’re in every world I exist in, your fate is my fate, either you follow me or I follow you, it doesn’t matter which and I don’t care. If that’s not love then maybe I don’t understand love, and that’s fine with me—it
he’s feeling tired and guilty and a bit like perhaps things would be better for everyone had he not been born. He feels this a lot.
relatable
This is the problem with knowledge: its inexhaustible craving. The madness inherent in knowing there is only more to know. It’s a problem of mortality, of seeing the invariable end from the immovable beginning, of determining that the more you try to fix it, the more beginnings there are to discover, the more ways to reach the same unavoidable end.
She was always fed up with living. Not really a fan of dying, either, though.
The most difficult thing in the world there is to do is to wake up in the morning and keep going,
He hadn’t mentioned the other things—the price, the way power was not something waiting to be called on like a lover but something to be stolen like a right. Power came at someone else’s loss, and she knew this about Atlas Blakely: he had to lose.
The trouble with knowledge, Miss Rhodes, is its inexhaustible craving. The problem is your need to know something because, after everything you’ve seen, the pain of not knowing would drive you mad.
When she trusted other people, things always went awry.
they still believed in what magic could do without knowing what it could cost.
the price of knowledge was too high. There was such a thing as too much power. Such a thing as too much knowledge.
Life was nothing but giving pieces of yourself away, little crumbs of joy to anesthetize the constancy of pain. Would it always be this, loving things only to lose them?
Because Atlas Blakely was right, they were similar, they were the same. They were dreamers! Not the productive kind, the kind with goals, but sad, empty dreamers. Half-broken men who made plans because they could not make terror—the awestruck kind, like glimpsing an angel with flaming torches for eyes. They were men who made terrible decisions because it was the only way to feel at all.
Imagine a god who did nothing but make smaller, worse gods. Well, that was mythology, Tristan supposed.
Grief, oh god, the weight of it. Depression was hollow, sadness was vacant. Neither was anything like this.
Tristan didn’t have to wish suffering upon her to know that it was coming. He cared enough about her to understand that the outcome of her choice had damaged her irreparably. He loved her enough to know that she was hurting unimaginably. He just didn’t want to help her do it anymore.
A man who did not want to listen to the voice of reason (or a woman) was a man cursed to deafness, to blindness, though unfortunately never to silence.
Sometimes uncertainty was a blessing, knowledge a burden, foresight a fucking curse.
SCENARIO 76. She killed him, obviously. Don’t play with matches. Don’t startle physicists who’ve traveled here on a fucking nuclear bomb. SCENARIO 87. At age seventeen, Tristan Caine choked on hot soup and died. SCENARIO 141. “Ready the starship, Captain Blakely!” called Tristan from the ship’s hull. “Right you are, Lieutenant Caine,” Atlas jovially returned. SCENARIO 196.
this feels like a joke…and not a very good one
life is always better with choices.
