A secret is only yours so long as you don’t share it. Tell it to one person, and it’s a secret no more.
I felt a familiar squeezing in what I thought must be my heart. I had heard of being “heartbroken” or “heavy-hearted” but I had never known it was an actual sensation one felt when the whole world abandons you.
We were speaking of people living their dreams, and I said that few do, and even fewer enjoy the experience. For too many, when they get their dream, they discover it is not what they wanted. Or the dream is bigger than their abilities, and all ends in bitterness.
Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning.
You are not a man as ordinary men are. They think they have a right to all beasts; to hunt them and eat them, or to subjugate them and rule their lives. You know you have no such right to mastery. The horse that carries you will do so because he wishes to, as does the wolf that hunts beside you. You have a deeper sense of yourself in the world. You believe you have a right, not to rule it, but to be part of it. Predator or prey; there is no shame to being either one.
That night I grasped another piece of the puzzle that Burrich had always been to me. For there is a very strange peace in giving over your judgment to someone else, to saying to them, “You lead and I will follow, and I will trust entirely that you will not lead me to death or harm.
As long as you believe it is impossible, you close your mind to understanding it.
Love is more than bedding, boy. If love doesn’t come first and linger after, if love can’t wait and endure disappointment and separation, then it’s not love. Love doesn’t require bedding to make it true. It doesn’t even demand day-to-day contact. I know this because I have known love, many kinds of love, and amongst them, I’ve know what I felt for you.
Now, anyone with two thoughts in their mind can see that no future is set in stone. An infinite number of futures bud at the end of every moment, and each one of them can be changed by a falling rose petal.
History is what we do in our lives. We create it as we go along.’ He smiled enigmatically. ‘The future is another kind of history.
But all fires, of wood or grief, burn down to ashes eventually.
I was lonely, and a lonely heart has hungers that can overpower both common sense and dignity.
Open your eyes. This horrible mess is your life. There is no sense in waiting for it to get better. Stop putting it off and live it.
There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it.” He shifted slightly in the dark. “And you never again lay awake all night, staring at darkness and thinking of them.
It is an odd language, yours. You speak of passing time as in the Mountains we speak of passing wind. As if it were a thing to be gotten rid of.
Something clamped tight inside her suddenly eased. He had been right. She did not have to grip her pain. She could let it go. The memory was still there. It had not vanished, but it had changed. It was a memory, a thing from her past. This wound could close and heal. The injury done to her was over. She did not have to keep it as a part of herself. She could allow herself to heal. Her tears were diluted in the rain that ran down her face.
Honour and courtesy and justice... they are not real, Fitz. We all pretend to them, and hold them to us like shields. But they guard only against folk who carry the same shields. Against those who have discarded them, they are no shields at all, but only additional weapons to use against their victims.
Why does the forbidden always add that edge of sweetness?
Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path.
Strangers had small interest in hurting you. That was always done best by your own family and friends.