Lila

“And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it.
Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow?
Were the moments of beauty worth the year of pain?
And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says 'Always.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back---I know you won't hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love. Many years later, as Sam would controversially say in an interview with the gaming website Kotaku, "There is no more intimate act than play, even sex." The internet responded: no one who had had good sex would ever say that, and there must be something seriously wrong with Sam.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built