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The point is there are no villains in this story, or maybe there are no heroes.
When an ecosystem dies, nature makes a new one. Don’t you get it? The world doesn’t end. Only we do.
I shouldn’t have asked for power when what I really wanted was meaning.
Nobody just casually opens the multiverse.”
Ends, beginnings, here it was all insubstantial nothingness; pointless, nonexistent pieces of an eternal answer, of eternalism itself. What was time without a place to start, a place to finish? It was nothing. Or it was everything, which was also nothing.
Capitulation. That was something Libby understood now; the dissonance that became inescapable clarity, just as the moment was right.
“Time is fluid,” Tristan continued. “Reality is open to interpretation, or else what am I even for? There have to be several steps between discovering the presence of other worlds and blowing up everything in existence.”
Once the idea of death becomes necessary, even palatable, there is always someone the rest of the herd can stand to lose.
“It’s an idea,” Nico corrected him with a shrug. “It’s not inherently good or bad.”
“Just because you make me happy doesn’t mean you don’t drive me absolutely insane.”
We don’t get to undo our mistakes. We just make new ones and try to make the next ones more interesting
Isn’t that all maturity is in the end? The gradual acceptance of personal idiocy?
“I’m saying that—yes, okay? Yes, obviously I wonder sometimes, Rhodes, because you push me and I need that, and I need you. I want you in my life in a way that fucking bleeds significance, but it isn’t…” He grimaced again. “Maybe it’s not the kind of significance you want it to have.”
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
What you’re willing to accept doesn’t change what I’m willing to give.”
“You and me. You can’t escape it. You don’t get an out.” “Is that a threat?” “Yes. It’s a promise, but menacing.”
“Maybe,” she agreed, which had the flavor of an apology. Top notes of a wish.
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.
ineffable. It had always been so bright, so glaring, the impossibility of the horizon. The potential they’d always known they had. What had they been born for if not for this? What had they been orbiting for so long, if not the inevitability of what they could be?
Beginnings and endings, stardust and stars.
He had already seen what death was. What a body could become. Particulates, granules. Meaningless components that combined could be a miracle.
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,
We are given exactly as much time as we need to be as human as we are, and that’s it.
Knowledge was a funny thing. It could be shared. It could be given. But it could not be stolen.
Fate never promised happy endings. Not every story had to be good or even long.
“Power isn’t something up for grabs,” she remarked to herself. “You have to take it from someone. You live with the cost.”
But no, no. Having and losing. It would hurt so much more this way. It would be so much more precious, fine, but the pain would be the price for having loved.
The world is pretty simple, in the end. People are bad. People are good. Inescapably there will be people, some who will disappoint you, some who will define you, unravel you, inspire you. These are facts. In every culture there is bread, and it is good.
the power you have will never be enough compared to the power you’ll always lack.
