The Atlas Complex (The Atlas, #3)

by Olivie Blake

Everything is hard, mijo, to live is a challenge.

perhaps Callum’s sense of safety lived, as he routinely claimed it did, in the comfort of his superior cleverness. Or maybe he’d always been rich, white, and male enough for the idea of danger to become laughably pretend.

“Besides, white men are always in fashion. I’d be just as well off then as I would in any other situation.”

We don’t get to undo our mistakes. We just make new ones and try to make the next ones more interesting

That is the duality of man, in a way. A person can see everything and nothing all at once.)

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.

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.

He felt a piece of his old self come back to him, a piece that wasn’t broken even if Nico was gone. 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.

Lots of people were depressed. Pain didn’t make Gideon special.

We are stardust on earth, we are impossible beings—the moral of the story shouldn’t revolve so absurdly on the behaviors of a condom or the decision one man makes to buy a gun and act out his hate. And yet it does, because what else can matter? The world as you believe it to exist is not a thing. The world is not an idea, something to be made or exalted or saved. It is an ecosystem of other people’s pain, a chorus of other people’s street foods, the variety of magic that people can make with the same set of chords. 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.