The Atlas Complex (The Atlas, #3)

by Olivie Blake

It was a small, gentle cruelty of life that most people with a true sense of purpose lack the talent to achieve it. The people with talent are far more likely directionless, an odd but unavoidable irony. (In Atlas Blakely’s experience, the best method for ruining someone’s life is to give them exactly

what they want and then politely get out of their way.)

The point is there are no villains in this story, or maybe there are no heroes.

Reading the mind of a person you cannot change is as powerless as time-traveling to an ending you can’t rewrite.

(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.

I shouldn’t have asked for power when what I really wanted was meaning.

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.

“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.

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 doesn’t make me angry to know I’m actually an idiot after all. And if it’s not enough for you, then okay, it’s not enough. That doesn’t change the fact that I’m willing to give it. What you’re willing to accept doesn’t change what I’m willing to give.”