Sahil > Books: favorites‎ (59)

“Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive – because we are so stupid about each other.”

“At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape. So a mother’s relationship with her daughter is poured into a vessel marked ‘mother and child’, and the relationship takes the contours of its container and is held inside there, for better or worse. Maybe some unhappy friends would have been perfectly contented as sisters, or married couples as parents and children, who knows. But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to put the water out and let it fall.”

“Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us. Or maybe it was just the end of one civilisation, ours, and at some time in the future another will take its place. In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.”

“It’s still better to love something than nothing, better to love someone than no one, and I’m here, living in the world, not wishing for a moment that I wasn’t. Isn’t that in its own way a special gift, a blessing, something very important?”

“Eileen put her arm around Alice’s shoulders. If you weren’t my friend I wouldn’t know who I was, she said. Alice rested her face in Eileen’s arm, closing her eyes. No, she agreed. I wouldn’t know who I was either. And actually for a while I didn’t. Eileen looked down at Alice’s small blonde head, nestled on the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Neither did I, she said.”

“I was tired, it was late, I was sitting half-asleep in the back of a taxi, remembering strangely that where I go, you are with me, and so is he, and that as long as you both live the world will be beautiful to me.”

“Watching the black-feathered bird rise above the three of them in this strange warm place filled him with a feeling he couldn’t describe, one he’d been feeling more and more since they’d fled. It was like a fullness. A presence, a realness. Before, he had been hollow, drained. No, draining. Becoming empty. And now there was something inside him again.

That enormous, warm feeling was charging up inside Ronan again, big enough now that he could tell what it was: Belonging.”

“It had been so long since he’d wanted something to happen, instead of wanting something to not happen. He’d forgotten what it felt like. It was equal parts great and terrible. It burned.”

“They were going to change the world. They were going to change their worlds. There was no going back. Was he doing this? He must be. What had he been made for, if not for this?”

“Matthew stared at his hands. “What if Ronan made me this way? What if he made me how I am?”

“So what if he did?” She took his hand and jiggled it. “Why do you think Declan’s got his curls? Why do you think Ronan’s an asshole? We all get handed things from our parents. We all have bodies that obey rules that we deal with. We’re not as different as you think.”

“When the kiss was done, Liliana said, “What are you going to do instead? I will come with you, of course.”

But Farooq-Lane’s voice didn’t waver as she replied, “Save the world.”

“This was perhaps what Declan liked the best about all of this, about Jordan Hennessy: She could handle herself. He’d never had anyone in his life who didn’t need him to manage, guard, chastise, protect. He’d never had an equal—he’d never even known he wanted an equal, and now that she was there, he liked it.”

“She longed for the Hennessy in the car, the one who thought she didn’t care about anything. What a splendid liar she was. She cared about everything.”

“Ronan Lynch, what do you want?”

He took a deep, shuddering breath. The fire was burning everything except for them.

“I want to change the world.”

“I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl who remembered things. Bobbi told me she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality’, but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterwards think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am.”

“You can love more than one person, she said.

That’s arguable.

Why is it any different from having more than one friend? You’re friends with me and you also have other friends, does that mean you don’t really value me?”

“Frances, I want you so badly, he said. I closed my eyes. The words seemed to go past my mind, like they went straight into my body and stayed there. When I spoke, my voice sounded low and sultry. Will you die if you can’t have me? I said. And he said: yes.”

“I should have known it wouldn’t work out between us.

Didn’t we always know that? he said.

I paused for a second. Then I just said: I didn’t.”

“How do you know when you give too much or too little to someone else?” she asked tentatively. “Like, how do you figure out how to love people, but then, not get… you know… walked on? How do people figure that out?”

Her mom thought for a while. “I think there probably aren’t many people who have it figured out perfectly. I guess it’s just little increments, always correcting this way or the other, like a seesaw. I don’t know if there’s any perfect balance between standing up for yourself and being generous.”

“The living always think that monsters roar and gnash their teeth. But I’ve seen that real monsters can be friendly; they can smile, and they can say please and thank you like everyone else. Real monsters can appear to be kind. Sometimes they can be inside us.”

“Maggie thought and then steeled her courage. “Pauline, why haven't you ever… you know? Liked Liam, like that?”

Pauline looked over at her thoughtfully. She lolled her head to the side, then fiddled with the visor. “I’m not into anyone that way. I don’t know. I just, I don’t see why everyone has to pair off and fall in love and everything anyway. Why can’t we just stay the way we are?”

“I know it sounds crazy, but I think I’m different from everyone else. Most people want to move forward, but not me. I just want to come home. I just wish I was little again.”

“I once thought that you could find all the secrets of the universe in someone’s hand.

And I think that’s true. I did find all the secrets of the universe in your hand. Your hand, Dante.”

“And then I heard myself whisper, “Mom, why didn’t anybody tell me that love hurts so much?”

“If I had told you, would it have changed anything?”

“There’s a world out there that’s going to make you feel like that you don’t belong in this country—or any other country, for that matter. But in this house, Ari, there is only belonging. You belong to us. And we belong to you.”

“Life, Ari, can be an ugly thing. But life can be so incredibly beautiful. It’s both. And we have to learn to hold the contradictions inside us without despairing, without losing our hope.”

“When you are standing all alone,” she whispered, “the people who notice—those are the people who stand by your side. Those are the people who love you.”

“I don’t ever want to wake up,” he whispered.

“We have to go home.”

“I’m already home. I’m with you.”

That made me smile. Such a Dante thing to say.”

“Maybe all we were meant to do on this earth was to keep on telling stories. Our stories—and the stories of the people we loved.”

“And then there was this: Love didn’t just have something to do with my heart—it had something to do with my body. And my body had never felt so alive. And then I knew, I finally knew about this thing called desire.”

“I love the rain more than anything.”

“I know. I want to be the rain.”

“You are the rain, Dante.” And I wanted to say You’re the rain and you’re the desert and you’re the eraser that’s making the word “loneliness” disappear. But it was too much to say and I would always be the guy that would say too little and Dante was the kind of guy who would always say too much.”

“And he asked me, “Why don’t you ever sing?”

“Singing means that you’re happy.”

“You’re not happy?”

“Maybe only when I’m with you.”

I loved when I said something that made Dante smile.”

“She just looked at me in that same kind of way that she had always looked at me. And I wondered if I could ever look at anybody like that, a look that held all the good things that existed in the known universe.”

“Everything was so new. It felt as if I had just been born. This life that I was living now, it was like diving into an ocean when all I had known was a swimming pool. There were no storms in a swimming pool. Storms, they were born in the oceans of the world.”

“I thought of the sound of his voice the very first time I heard it. I didn’t know that voice was going to change my life. I thought he was only going to teach me how to swim in the waters of this swimming pool. Instead, he taught me how to dive into the waters of life.”

“Last year, Mr. Blocker said we could find ourselves in our own writing. All I could think was this: Sounds like a good place to get lost. Yeah, I think I might get lost a hundred times, a thousand times, before I find out who I am and where I’m going.”

“Sometimes I had beautiful words living inside of me and I just couldn’t push those words out so that other people could see they were there.”

“My mother smiled—and then she broke into a very soft laugh. She ran her fingers through my hair. “Oh, Ari, let your sisters love you. Let yourself be loved. For all you know, there’s a long line of people wanting you to let them in.”

“I didn’t know if I was crying because of what my father had said. I think that was part of it. But, really, I think I was crying about a lot of things, about me and my desire for another boy’s body, which was mysterious and terrifying and confusing. I was crying about my brother, whose ghost haunted me. I was crying because I realized how much I loved my father, who was becoming someone I knew. He wasn’t a stranger anymore. I was crying because I had wasted so much time thinking shitty things about him, instead of seeing him as a quiet, kind man who had suffered through a hell called war and had survived.”

“Everyone had disappeared from the universe except the young man whose hand I was holding, and everything that had ever been born and everything that had ever died existed where his hand touched mine. Everything—the blue of the sky, the rain in the clouds, the white of the sand, the water in the oceans, all the languages of all the nations, and all the broken hearts that had learned to beat in their brokenness.”

“I didn’t feel lost as I kissed Dante. Not lost at all. I had found where I belonged.”

“I had never felt this alive and I thought that I would never love anyone or anything as much as I loved Dante in this very moment. He was the map of the world and everything that mattered.”

“I sometimes felt like I’d been asleep for a long time—and when I met Dante, I began to wake up, and I began seeing not only him but the mean and terrible and awesome world I lived in. The world was a scary place to live in, and it would always be scary—but you could learn not to be afraid. I guess I had to decide what was more real, the scary things or—or Dante. Dante, he was the most real thing in my world.”

“Before we left, she told us to always remember the things that matter, and that it was up to us to decide what mattered and what didn’t. She hugged us both. “And remember that you matter more to the universe than you will ever know.”

“It was so easy just to be with Dante. When we touched, it seemed like it was something pure. What wasn’t easy was learning how to live in the world, with all of its judgments. Those judgments managed to make their way into my body. It was like swimming in a storm at sea. Any minute, you could drown. At least it felt like that. One minute the sea was calm. And then there was a storm. And the problem, with me, anyway, was that the storm lived inside me."

“People were complicated. I was complicated. Dante, he was complicated, too. People—they were included in the mysteries of the universe. What mattered is that he was an original. That he was beautiful and human and real and I loved him—and I didn’t think anything would ever change that.”

“Your loneliness made me sad, Ari. And there’s something about you. I mean, people are like countries, and me and Gina, and your friend Dante, we’re all countries—and maybe you’ve given your friend Dante a visa. But even if you have, that’s just one person. And one person isn’t enough. Having friends is like traveling. Gina and I have offered you a visa to travel to our countries whenever you want. So, Ari, when are you going to give us a visa? We want so much to visit you. We want so much for you to show us around your beautiful country.” And she was crying again.”

“Let’s map out the year, Dante. Let’s write our names and chart out some paths. And go see what we have never seen. And be what we have never been.”

“You know, we not only have to be smart enough to be cartographers—we also have to be brave enough to dive into waters that may not be very friendly.”

“But the problem was that love was never safe. Love took you to places you had always been afraid to go. What the hell did I know about love? Sometimes, when I was in Dante’s presence, I felt that I knew everything there was to know about love. But, for me, to love was one thing. To let yourself be loved, well, that was the most difficult thing of all.”

“And all of this is because you looked at me one day at a swimming pool and said to yourself, I bet I can teach this guy how to swim. You saw me and I wasn’t invisible anymore. You taught me how to swim. And I didn’t have to be afraid of the water anymore. And you gave me enough words to rename the universe I lived in.”

“I was also learning that loving someone was different from falling in love with them."

“You are made of dreams and this world is not for you.”

“Adam.

Ronan missed him like a lung.”

“It felt like sadness was like radiation, like the amount of time between exposures was irrelevant, like you got a badge that eventually got filled up from a lifetime of it, and then it just killed you.”

“Everyone thinks their world is the only one. A flea believes a dog is the world. A dog believes the kennel is the world. The huntsman thinks his country is the world. The king believes the globe is the world. The farther out you get, the wider you get, the higher you get, the more you see you have misunderstood the bounds of what is possible. Of what is right and wrong. Of what you can truly do.”

“There was only the quiet that came after all those things. There was only the quiet that came when you were the only one left. Only the quiet that came when you were something strange enough to outsurvive the things that killed or drove away everyone you loved.”

“Belonging in more than one world means that you end up belonging in none of them.”

“Sometimes I think that maybe we are just stories. Like we may as well just be words on a page, because we're only what we've done and what we are going to do.”

“To love someone was not what she had expected. It was like falling from somewhere high up and breaking in half, and only one person having the secret to the puzzle of putting her back together.”

“For the girls with messy hair and thirsty hearts.”

“She did not believe he could have really gone, because for her, to leave the person you loved was impossible.”

“You have to be careful who you meet. You can’t unmeet them.”

“I'm not myself," she offered, guiltily. She softened around Tik Tok, and when she did she was, for those rare moments, girlish.

He smiled. "You can never say that. You're just a piece of yourself right now that you don't like.”

“Sometimes love means not being able to bear seeing the one you love the way they are, when they're not what you hoped for.”

“Sometimes I can't see myself when I'm with you. I can only just see you.”

“And I never expected that you could have a broken heart and love with it too, so much that it doesn't seem broken at all.”

“Still, the longer I was around her, the more I could see the colors of her mind and the recesses of her heart. There was a beast in there. But there was also a girl who was afraid of being a beast, and who wondered if other people had beasts in their hearts too. There was strength, and there was also just the determination to look strong. She guarded herself like a secret.”

“Everyone will think I'm ugly.”

Tik Tok smiled. "That's true. But we are a small village. We have narrow tastes. There's no telling who else in the world would think you're beautiful.”

“I like to think that nothing's final, and that everyone gets to be together even when it looks like they don't, that it all works out even when all the evidence seems to say something else, that you and I are always young in the woods, and that I'll see you sometime again, even if it's not with any kind of eyes I know of or understand. I wouldn't be surprised if that is the way things go after all - that all things end happy.”

“No mourners. No funerals.”

“Have any of you wondered what I did with all the cash Pekka Rollins gave us?”

"Guns?" asked Jesper.

"Ships?" queried Inej.

"Bombs?" suggested Wylan.

"Political bribes?" offered Nina. They all looked at Matthias. "This is where you tell us how awful we are," she whispered.”

“I would have come for you. And if I couldn't walk, I'd crawl to you, and no matter how broken we were, we'd fight our way out together-knives drawn, pistols blazing. Because that's what we do. We never stop fighting.”

“When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway.”

“Crows remember human faces. They remember the people who feed them, who are kind to them. And the people who wrong them too. They don’t forget. They tell each other who to look after and who to watch out for.”

“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it. She had that feeling in school often, but it wasn’t accompanied by any specific images of what the real life might look or feel like. All she knew was that when it started, she wouldn’t need to imagine it anymore.”

“How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary. No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.”

“It’s funny the decisions you make because you like someone, he says, and then your whole life is different. I think we’re at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions. But you’ve been a very good influence on me overall, like I definitely am a better person now, I think. Thanks to you.

When we were together in first year of college, she says, were you lonely then?

No. Were you?

No. I was frustrated sometimes but not lonely. I never feel lonely when I’m with you.

Yeah, he says. That was kind of a perfect time in my life, to be honest. I don’t think I was ever really happy before then.”

“He had just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing. It was Marianne who had shown him other things were possible. Life was different after that; maybe he had never understood how different it was.”

“For a few seconds they just stood there in stillness, his arms around her, his breath on her ear. Most people go through their whole lives, Marianne thought, without ever really feeling that close with anyone.”

“And I wonder what the sound of a heart breaking might be. And I think it might be quiet, unperceptively so, and not dramatic at all. Like the

“And I wonder what the sound of a heart breaking might be. And I think it might be quiet, unperceptively so, and not dramatic at all. Like the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.”

“There's something about first love, isn't there? she said. It's untouchable to those who played no part in it. But it's the measure of all that follows.”

“I haven't cried. But sometimes I feel as if my veins are leaking, as if my body is overwhelmed, as if I'm drowning from the inside.”

“Never let anyone make you feel ordinary.”

“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me'- that's intimacy.”

“Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.”

“The snow made the choice, not me.
Not the party.
And certainly not the lure of a young man with bronze eyes and a broken throne.”

“The snow made the choice, not me.
Not the party.
And certainly not the lure of a young man with bronze eyes and a broken throne.”

“She was happy, yes, in her own way, as best as she knew. But there’s a difference between a single candle in darkness and a sunrise.”

“Are you with us, Shade Barrow?”

“I’m with you, Diana.”

“Then we will rise.”

His voice joins mine.

“Red as the dawn.”

“Nowhere is quiet, not in the world ahead or the world behind.”

“I try to stay out of things, try to keep my focus on what’s right in front of me. I don’t bother with great and terrible people of the world. I only know what I must of them to stay alive, stay ahead, and nothing more.”

“I’m on a Red Riverman’s keelboat, outnumbered and hated by everyone around me, with nowhere to go but forward, a dead girl on the run.”

“For now I can rest, and heal my iron heart.”

“Princess Evangeline. Lady of House Samos. Daughter of Volo and Larentia. I am none of those things anymore. Not after today. I should be glad – I should be relieved to be rid of the name and the life my parents gave me. And parts of me are. But the rest of me can’t help but be reminded of what I traded away to live as who I am now. What I betrayed. What I killed. What I lost forever.”

“I know you like to pretend to be made of iron. Even in your heart, my love. I know better, and you don’t have to hide with me.”

“We were right to come here. To rebuild ourselves, to figure out who we are now, in spite of our missing pieces.”

“I am almost nineteen. I have nothing but time. To choose, to heal. To live.”

“Even without her lightning, Mare Barrow still manages to strike me through.”

“It would hurt him deeply, wound him forever, if I let him glimpse what little is left of me. That I’m still here, in some forgotten corner, just waiting to be found. I could ruin him with one glance, one echo of the brother he remembers. Or I could free him of me. Make the choice for him. Give my brother one last proof of the love I can no longer feel, even if he never knows it.”

“But like always, I could not let him go. Even now, I cannot let Maven go. I never will.”

“History will remember you, mark my words. Make sure it remembers you well.”

“We destroy. We rebuild. We destroy again. It is the constant of our kind. We are all a god’s chosen, and we are all a god’s cursed.”

“Sometimes they would stop talking and instead begin kissing, and Opal would eavesdrop on this as well. Her capacity for voyeurism was boundless and incorrigible. They were always coming together in surprising moments, going from easygoing to urgent in the space of a few breaths. She watched them kiss messily in the car in the driveway and she watched them tangle around each other in the laundry room and she watched Adam unbuckle Ronan’s belt and slide his hand against skin. With intellectual curiosity, she watched ribs and hips and arms and legs and spines. She had no lust, because Ronan hadn’t dreamt any for her, but she also had no shame, because Ronan hadn’t dreamt any of that for her, either.”

“Enter the players. There were seven of us then, seven bright young things with wide precious futures ahead of us, though we saw no farther than the books in front of our faces.”

“I’m scared.” She said it with a wry smile, as if it were somehow embarrassing.

“Of what?” I asked, not because there was nothing to be scared of, but because there were so many scary things to choose from.

She shrugged. “Of what happens now.”

“We had, like seven siblings, spent so much time together that we had seen the best and worst of one another and were unimpressed by either.”

“She says, “Were you in love with him?”

“Yes,” I say, simply. “Yes, I was.” It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I’m in love with him still.”

“When did we become such terrible people?”

“Maybe we’ve always been terrible.”

“Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?”

“I blame him for all of it,” I say.

“I wonder if sometimes you can miss something so much it breaks you, and still be happy you left.”

“I think all my life my heart’s been broken,” Adri whispered, “and I didn’t even notice. And I don’t even know by what.”

“I think that's what you say when you can't have something you want, isn't it? You say you don't want it in the first place.”

“I think the rest of the world is not as cold and lonely a place as you think. At least I have to hope.”