Upset isn’t the same as the world falling apart.
The rest of us just have to live here, hovering around the edges, left out of it all, for the most part.
And that, the monster said, is not the truth at all.
Yer calling for me son, and I will answer.
For a man would know the necessary choices that have to be made when one is facing one’s oblivion.
La vida no la escribes con palabras, la escribes con acciones.
It does not matter what you think, the monster said, because you mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day.
Early Christians thought your soul was in your stomach,” I say.
The boy who refused to lose his soul.
He didn’t want to go and look. But at the same time, a part of him wanted to look more than anything.
There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere inbetween. Conor shook his head. “That’s a terrible story. And a cheat.” It is a true story, the monster said. Many things that are true feel like a cheat.
And here was a man who lived on belief, but who sacrificed it at the first challenge, right when he needed it most. He believed selfishly and fearfully. And it took the lives of his daughters.
I want a world where you can live and be happy.
That’s a load of crap!” Conor shouted. “He didn’t need to kill her. The people were behind him. They would have followed him anyway.” The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism, said the monster. And so the injustice that I saw, the reason that I came walking, was for the queen, not the prince.
But what is a dream, Conor O’Malley? Who is to say that it is not everything else that is the dream?
Say you were standing on a hilltop with someone who had no Noise. Would it be like you were alone there? How would you share it? Would you want to? I mean, here we are, the girl and I, heading outta danger and into the unknown and there’s no Noise overlapping us, nothing to tell us what the other’s thinking. Is that how it’s sposed to be?
You are what you remember. You are what you hold on to.
But that’s the risk, isn’t it? Being the best gives you nowhere to go but down. It also makes you a target, for if someone else wants to be the best, they have to beat you, don’t they?
If war is hard – and it is, forever and always – then after war is just as hard, in a different way.
And we dream the same in my town as you probably do in a city. We yearn the same, wish the same. We’re just as screwed-up and brave and false and loyal and wrong and right as anyone else.