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"All they were—all
they had ever been—was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other
was the sun."

"All I want to do is make you happy, and you’re the unhappiest person
I’ve ever met.”

"They watched each other’s eyes, rested their foreheads together
as if from opposite sides of a mirror. Their bodies belonged to each other
because they were the same body. They had been just one person, long ago,
but had been cut from one another before they were born."

"There was already the shadow of a transformation inside them. How could
Paul brace himself for the real thing when the transcendence was already
too terrible to bear? It would be like looking at God."

"It should have been more conspicuous, the secret they carried between
them like two children playing at spies. It glowed in their skin, filled their
horizon with colors no one else could see. "

"It was a relief and a horror to be known so
perfectly."

"All he could think about was throwing himself against a wall,
over and over, until he’d smashed himself into shards so fine that the void
inside him could finally slip free."

“Nothing I do is ever going to matter.” The longer he spoke, the lighter
he felt. “Everything I do is so small and so useless. I’m not like you. I don’t
even have a shape of my own to hold anything else in place. The world
would be exactly the same without me—if I disappeared you’d be the same,
as if I’d never been here at all. I’ll never matter the way you do, and you
know it. You don’t need me.”

"There was something unsettling in the way the golden
autumn light moved over his cheekbones, a beauty so fleeting and elusive
that Paul knew he wouldn’t be able to hold it in his memory. "

"Once he knew the shape of someone else’s pain,
he could break off a piece of it—claim it as his own, keep it as a memento
under glass—and know they would be grateful to him for taking it away."

“Hard to trust you if you’re going to maim me,”- Paul

“Don’t be boring.”- Julian

They could only stitch themselves
back together if they did something irreversible.

He would have done anything, anything at all, if it meant Julian would
look at him this way a moment longer. The green of his eyes, like white
winter light vectored through the crest of a wave; the ravenous grasping for
evidence that Paul loved him, and the relief and terror at finding it.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Pablo. You’re just so sincerely
creepy.”- Julian

He had all but pleaded for it, the precision and scalpel-sharp intimacy of
Julian’s cruelty. He had needed to remember that they were monstrous
together, merciless, twins conjoined at the teeth.

"What a lonely, dreary thing it is to know the truth. What a relief it is that now
neither of us has to be alone in knowing."- Julian

“I kill them because they’re beautiful, and
it’s the only way I can keep them.”

BUTTERFLIES HE'S TALKING ABOUT BUTTERFLIES

"Anticipation was almost indistinguishable from panic. The speed of his
pulse, the tightness in his tendons—the anatomy of it, by any objective
measure, was the same as the anatomy of fear. The difference lay in the
sense of purpose, which reshaped the nervous tension into something
electric."

“I’m going to push you off a cliff, you fucking Boy Scout.”

The only valid reaction to being woken up (early) to go hiking 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

“I don’t think you’ve ever felt anything that didn’t hurt you,” - Julian

"He couldn’t put a name to what he felt, but he knew it
would be dishonest not to feel it."

"It frightened Paul how readily he yielded to the
pain, almost as if he were so used to it that it bored him. "

“Your family, I mean—they like
you. But they don’t understand you, do they?”- Julian

"Paul was almost relieved to feel the sting. It meant Julian saw every
weakness in him and still thought he was worth the effort of hurting."

Well now I have Major thoughts with a capital M.

"And it’s
gorgeous—when chess is played at its best, by two genuinely great players,
it’s a work of art made from pure reason." -Julian

Omg stop making me feel guilty about playing chess based on instinct and flukes...🥲

“Whatever I do has to mean something.” He hugged his knees and stared
at them; it took all his nerve to raise his voice above a mumble. “I need to
make something beautiful, something that lasts. I don’t know what, but I
have to, if I want my life to matter at all.”- Paul

“So what are you telling yourself to do?”- Julian

"Reasons to stay
alive, however little joy it brought. The same words appeared every time, duty and defiance and refusing to submit to weakness."

“I’ve actually been thinking
this whole time how I can’t really make sense of you. You’re nothing like
anyone else, and now I know it’s not because of where you come from.
Nothing made you. You just are.” - Paul