Carve the Mark

“Any more than you choose your fate.You and I,we’ve become what we were made to become.”

And I always told him I would rather die alone.It was true.

In that moment, he liked all the things she didn't say more than the things she did.

The scars on her face said something different about her, too-that she, like Cyra, knew what she was risking when she risked her life.

What a person did when they were in pain said a lot about them.

I know what it is to become something you hate, I know how it hurts. But life is full of hurt. And your capacity for baring it is much greater than you believe.

I saw, for the first time, how thin the line was between fear and love, between reverence and adoration.

There was a hunger inside me, and there always had been. That hunger was stronger than pain, stronger than horror. It gnawed even after everything else inside me had given up. It was not hope; it did no soar; it slithered, clawed, and dragged, and it would not let me stop.
And when I finally named it, I found it was something very simple: the desire to live.

Though I had already read all those books, I wanted to open them again just to search out the parts he most treasured; I wanted to read them as if immersed in his mind.

I may be in pain, but I am not weak.

Pain had a way of breaking time down. I thought about the next minute, the next hour. There wasn't enough space in my mind to put all those pieces together, to find words to summarize the whole of it. But the "keep doing" part, I knew the words for.
"Find another reason to go on, " I said. "It doesn't have to be a good one, or a noble one. It just has to be a reason.

You want to see people as extremes. Bad or good, trustworthy or not. I understand. It's easier that way. But that isn't how people work.

Soft hearts make the universe worth living in.