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“And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis for everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.”

“And even if you were a pawn - maybe we all are - then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.”

“She was in shock. But it was a slightly different kind of shock than the others on the dinghy assumed. It wasn’t the shock of having been close to death. It was the shock of realizing she actually wanted to live.”

“Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.”

“ Nora shook her head. Wishing it would fall off. Her own head. Onto the floor. So she would never have a conversation with a stranger ever again.”

“According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal maybe that was the real life lesson.”

🥹♥️🥵🏒

“I was obsessed with you for years before I left. I used to sneak into your room just to watch you breathe. I waited, each day agony as I begged the gods for you to finally admit we were meant to be together.”

Look what humans had done. We had looked at the world around us—the dirt under our feet, the stars in the sky, the speed of a feather falling from the top of a building—and we had taught ourselves to fly.

“I would give you anything,” Vanessa said, “if it wasn’t going to cost us everything.”

“I would never ask it,” Joan said, shaking her head. Her tears began to fall, and she dried them.

“Which is how I know that you’d be worth giving it to,” Vanessa said.

In all her time spent watching others, she hadn’t picked up on this part of falling in love, that someone could look at you as if you were the very center of everything. And even though you knew better, you’d allow yourself a moment to believe you were worth of being revolved around, too.

“I do not believe there is any original sin in any of us and I cannot sit there and listen to someone say there is. I don’t want to believe in any being who would judge and punish like that. And I’ll pay the price if I’m wrong and God does exist. Because I will not submit to a God like that willingly.”

One of my favorite quotes so far!!

“And I want to hear you tell me anything you’ve always wanted to tell someone. Because you know that you’ve met someone who desperately wants to listen.” Joan’s heat was in her throat, and she could not swallow it down. “No one has ever… said anything that wonderful to me before,” she said trying to keep her voice level and failing.

I want to take you everywhere. And do everything with you. And ask you every single question that’s been on my mind for months. And I want to know when you knew what was happening between us and I want to tell you when I knew. And I want to hold your hand in a quiet corner and I want to lie in bed and hear your heartbeat through your chest. I want to bring you coffee in bed.

“I feel like I could know you forever and still be curious about what you’re going to say next.”

“Of course we look for the gods there,” Vanessa said. “And if we make it up there, we’re going to have to fight against that sneaking suspicion that we might just be gods ourselves.”

“The steady hum of the wind drowned out almost everything except for the sound of her own voice inside her mind. Which was such a gift. She had always been her greatest friend, her greatest guide.”

“ ‘Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but being strong enough to do it anyway… Neither of us are particularly brave right now,’ Vanessa said. ‘But both of us are going to be courageous.’ “

“So it came as a huge shock to the men in the department, many of whom fancied themselves secretly destined for victory, to see that the woman they’d overlooked was lapping then in a race they did not know had started.”

Oh god, pulling teeth to get this far. Gotta DNF, this book has made me avoid my kindle. There’s too many great books on my TBR to slag through this miserable one.

“He say straight in his school uniform, trying far too hard to appear serious. To Misaki, it perfectly captured her son — a boy with enough talent to never have to try hard at anything, who had tried harder than everyone at everything, until the very end.”

“Wholeness, she had leaned, was not the absence of pain but the ability to hold it.”

“It is enough that, even for a moment, I had a son like you. It is enough that Hiroshi, Nagasa, and Izumo will have a brother like you to look up to as they become young men themselves. It is enough.”