Fanabana

“For here was the thing that no fairy tale would ever admit, but that she understood in that moment: love was not inherently good.

Certainly, it could inspire goodness. She didn’t argue that. Poets would tell you that love was electricity in your veins that could light a room. That it was a river in your soul to lift you up and carry you away, or a fire inside the heart to keep you warm.

Yet electricity could also fry, rivers could drown, and fires could burn; love could be destructive. Punishingly, fatally destructive.

And the other thing, the real bloody clincher of it all, was that the good and the bad didn’t get served up equally. If love were a balance of electric lights and electric jolts, two sides of an equally weighted coin, then fair enough. She could deal.

That wasn’t how it worked, though. Some love was just the bad, all the time: an endless parade of electrified bones and drowned lungs and hearts that burned to a cinder inside the cage of your chest.

And so she looked down at her son and loved him with the kind of twisted, complex feeling that came from having never wanted him in the first place; she loved him with bitterness, and she loved him with resignation. She loved him though she knew no good could ever come from such a bond.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“...I had been inhuman by obeying duty's voice. But I was now free to listen no longer, to no longer obey the voices that command us not to be human when we must.”
― David Diop, At Night All Blood is Black

“This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason—the capacity in Shakespeare’s Iago which Coleridge called “motiveless Malignity”—and we also contain the antidote to that disease—courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“I understood now that his innocence didn't come from not knowing anything, but rather from having seen everything there was to see, understanding it, and setting it down.”
― Yan Ge, Strange Beasts of China