Charity

“Maybe, Devon thought, that was the best anybody could hope for in life: to be missed when gone, however one had lived.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“He told me that everything I was afraid of in the dark was also there in the light. The only difference was the way it looked.”
― Nick Martell, The Kingdom of Liars

“Your life,” she began, voice rising, “is important. All our lives are important— from the guards in my keep to the dye pit workers on the East Side. Don’t throw it away just because you’re angry at some bitch in red and grey. What would your father think of that? If you want to stop her, change the country. Ensure that we never see another rebellion like this again. If you’re angry with the Corrupt Prince, aid the princess so he never sees the throne. You are a Kingman, and sacrificing your life would be pointless and cowardly. Do you understand me? Or should I explain it again?”
― Nick Martell, The Kingdom of Liars

“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