Atlas Books

“only the dead keep secrets."

"it is not easy. Taking a life, even when we knew it was required."

"most people want only to be cared for. If I had no softness, I'd get nowhere at all."

"a flaw of humanity. The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable sameness."

"someone always gains, just like someone always loses."

"most women are less in love with the partners they choose than they are simply desperate for their approval, starving for their devotion. They want most often to be touched as no one else can touch them, and most of them inaccurately assume this requires romance. But the moment we realize we can feel fulfilled without carrying the burdens of belonging to another, that we can experience rapture without being someone's other half, and therefore beholden to their weaknesses, to their faults and failures and their many insufferable fractures, then we're free, aren't we? "

" enough, for once, to feel, and nothing else. "

" there was no stopping what one person could believe. "

" I noticed that if I did certain things, said things in certain way, or held her eye contact while I did them, I could make her... Soften toward me. "

" I think I've already decided what I'm going to do, and I just hope it's the right thing. But it isn't, or maybe it is. But I suppose it doesn't matter, because I've already started, and looking back won't help. "

" luck is a matter of probabilities. "

"you want to believe that your hesitation makes you good, make you feel better? It doesn't. Every single one of us is missing something. We are all too powerful, too extraordinary, and don't you see it's because we're riddled with vacancies? We are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal, that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn. "

" ask yourself where power comes from, if you can't see the source, don't trust it. "

" an assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether he lived or died as a result of his own choice? Unimportant. He didn't raise an army didn't fight for good, didn't interfere much with the queen's other evils. It was whether or not he could live with his own decision because life was the only thing that truly matters. "

" the truest truth : mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn't buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In term of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself. "

" humans were mostly sensible animals. They knew the dangers of erratic behavior. It was a chronic condition, survival. My intention is as same as others. Stand taller, think smarter, be better. "

" she couldn't remember what version of her had put herself into that relationship, into that life, or somehow into this shape, which still looked and felt as it always had but wasn't anymore. "

" conservative of energy meant that there must be dozens of people in the world who didn't exist because of she did. "

" what replace feelings when there were none to be had? "

" the absence of something was never as effective as the present of something. "

"To be suspended in nothing, he said, was to lack all motivation, all desire. It was not numbness which was pleasurable in fits, but functional paralysis. Neither to want to live nor to die, but to never exist. Impossible to fight."

"apology accepted. Forgiveness, however, declined."

"there cannot be success without failure. No luck without unluck."

"no life without death?"

"Everything collapse, you will, too. You will, soon.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six