That’s another thing about Noise. Everything that’s ever happened to you just keeps right on talking, for ever and ever.
Stories are the wildest things of all. Stories chase and bite and hunt.
Being a leader is making the people you love hate you a little more each day.
War makes monsters out of men.
Knowledge is dangerous and men lie and the world changes, whether I want it to or not.
And it feels like, finally.
You went up a girl and came down a woman.
I’ll find you- Keep calling for me, Viola- Cuz here I come.
Girls are small and polite and smiley. They wear dresses and their hair is long and it’s pulled into shapes behind their heads or on either side.
We run down the right fork, Manchee at our heels, the night and a dusty road stretching out in front of us, an army and a disaster behind us, me and Viola, running side by side.
It’s a trick Ben taught me to help settle my Noise. You close yer eyes and as clearly and calmly as you can you tell yerself who you are, cuz that’s what gets lost in all that Noise.
And it’s a sad song, Todd, but it’s also a promise. I’ll never deceive you and I’ll never leave you and I promise you this so you can one day promise it to others and know that it’s true.
No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appall you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.
I remember the ache I used to feel when she got too close, how it felt like grief, how it felt like a loss, like I was falling, falling into nothing, how it clenched me up and made me want to weep, made me actually weep.
Everything that’s happened has brought me here, to this place, with this knife in my hand, and something worth saving.
And I look at her sitting there and she looks across the river and we wait as the dawn fully arrives, each of us knowing. Each of us knowing the other.
Worst is the one who knows better and does nothing.
And it hurts her, but it’s an okay hurt, but it hurts still, but it’s good, but it hurts.
Here I am. Here we are. Here we go. Here is all that matters.
Don’t think you haven’t lived long enough to have a story to tell.