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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.)
“You shouldn’t have bothered,” Atlas muttered to his mother once, thinking how it’s a trap, really. The whole thing. Hitting go on an invisible timer for an ending you don’t get to see. You don’t know how it ends, so you just … you do and you try and inevitably you fail, invariably you suffer, and for what?
doesn’t matter where it started. Doesn’t matter where it ends. We’re part of the cycle whether we like it or not, so don’t be the wasteland. Be the locusts. Be the plague.
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.
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.
“The problem is institutional. It’s greed,” she said bluntly. “The inability to separate human existence from the necessity of profit. Even if a cure for Maggie existed in the library—”
“Do you really think that’s true? That there can be any decisions free from ethics?” Like a proverbial state of nature, a stasis that had never existed without someone’s agenda pressing in. “I guess technically no,” Nico admitted, “not actually. But ethics are weird, they’re tricky. I mean, I can’t be ethical. I can’t buy a T-shirt or eat a mango without harming a thousand people in the process.
