I walked the maintenance tunnels, my face pulsing. The memory of his lips against my cheek played over and over in my mind. I tried to stomp it down like a stray ember. I couldn’t kindle it and still do what needed to be done.
In other words, magic is a mirror. It reflects us back to ourselves, and we may not always like what we see.
She made ugly things beautiful, somehow, and he would never understand it.
Art,” I said as we parted, “is both vulnerable and brave.
It is the symptom of a disease that still infects our population – the desire to make everything easy, to sacrifice autonomy and privacy for convenience. That’s what technology is, Ms. Kantor. A concession to laziness and the devaluing of human effort.
But time could not move backward. Just as he had been made, he had to be unmade.
Stand up straight. Speak clearly. Don’t be afraid to think about your answer – the pause feels longer to you than it does to them.
And she would tarnish too. Always famous but always fading, the way old movie stars were, carrying ghosts of their younger selves in their faces.
Obligation was dangerous because it muddled the mind.
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.
Why take a shower when you’re just going to get dirty? Why eat when you’re just going to get hungry? Every flower dies eventually, Sam. But not yet.
Sloanie Sloanie Macaroni.
Most of the time I was so close to falling into the darkest, emptiest place inside me that I just tried to feel nothing at all.
Sometimes it’s hard to know how to take care of people.
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.
Just because you’re not committing a crime now, by going where you go, by seeing who you see, doesn’t mean that another government, another set of people with another set of priorities, won’t come along and call you a criminal one day.
Trades rely on trust, the belief that if you give what you agree to give, you will receive what is promised.
No one sought a job on an interstellar transport ship because their life was working out as planned.
In that moment, with our fingers laced together and his calm voice in my ear, I would have done whatever he suggested.
Joy is the thief of time, and time is the thief of joy’?