“We might not have months or years, but we have moments. Thousands upon thousands of them. Let’s take each moment, seize it and wring it dry.”
“I felt him in every pore, every breath and beat of our hearts. I’d never experienced anything like this in my life. He was a universe. My love for him was just as boundless.”
“We do not remember days, we remember moments. –Cesare Pavese”
“You are a universe, Kacey. I kept waiting to find the end of your love and beauty, the end of your generous heart. I never did. I never will.”
“Whenever the urge to kiss him came over me, I would kiss him. No more living life halfway. We had to go full tilt, just like the card players did. I would hit instead of stay. Always. We”
“I would love you forever, Kacey, if I only had the chance.”
“That you can find beauty everywhere, even in the things that scare you the most.”
“No. You will. Love him. Love him with everything. Like you loved me. Love him more.” His eyes closed. “I’m so happy, Kace. Never like this in my life. It’s…a gift. You know?” I”
“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They are in each other all along,” she recited.”
“I love you,” I said. “God, I never thought this would happen to me.”
“But it did,” she whispered. “It happened and all we can do now is take care of each other. Live in the little moments, right? Just like we promised. The little moments. We have so many. Thousands upon thousands.”
“I didn’t know it then—I couldn’t have—but in that moment, the rest of my life, or what was left of it, began.”
“A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. –Mark Twain”
“Make someone else…feel like I do right now. Okay? Promise.” I”
“My world had been fading to gray until she burst in like a bombshell of color and light...”
“We had to go full tilt, just like the card players did. I would hit instead of stay. Always.”
“He kissed me as if I were something delicate and precious, something he cherished and held with reverence. "My first kiss. This is my first real kiss.”
“That’s my legacy: I loved you and was loved by you. I’m”
“I’m going to leave you,” I said, my voice hardly more than a whisper. The words hung between us, the crux of all our pain and tears and hesitation. But Kacey smiled—smiled—with brave tears sliding down her cheeks. “Not yet. Not tonight. We might not have months or years, but we have moments. Thousands upon thousands of them. Let’s take each moment, seize it and wring it dry.”
“I’m more afraid of not being with you than I am of being with you.”
“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They are in each other all along,”
“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”
I looked at Kacey sitting beside me. She is not merely an ocean. She is an entire universe.”
“I can’t stand it. I have my circle and that’s it. I don’t want to tell people outside the circle. I don’t want them to have to find out. I don’t let anyone in…”
“And yet,” I said, gulping air, getting a hold of myself. “Here I am.”
“Here you are…” He said, his eyes roaming my face. “Believe me, I didn’t want to let you in. But it was almost as if…”
“What?” I whispered.
“As if I didn’t have a choice,” He said. “I tried to keep [my] walls up, keep to my routine… But you got in anyway.” He gently swiped a tear from my chin. “You feel it too, right?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.”
“I held onto my brother, clutched him tight. He was solid and real, while I was already dissipating into the air, particle by particle. “Don’t let me vanish, Theo. Please. Help me…” Theo’s”
“I kissed Jonah Fletcher with all of my heart, and with every piece of my soul that would love him forever.”
“Dying, I learned, is a not a team sport. It’s a solitary endeavor. Everyone I loved was standing on dry land, while I was alone on a boat as it slowly pulled away from the shore, and there’s nothing anyone could do about it but watch it happen.”
“firmly believe in the concept of Happily Ever After. For everyone. No matter how or who or when they fell in love. Because that love existed, they felt it, and that is worth everything. Love”
“A word or a touch that might change everything...
But it can't. I can't take her down that road with me because eventually we'll come to the place where I have to go on, and she can't follow.”
“We might not have months or years, but we have moments. Thousands upon thousands of them. Let’s take each moment, seize it and wring it dry. Okay?”
“That damn mara was an emotional ninja, sneaking up on your heart when you least expected it.”
“Maddy shook her head, as if the movement could somehow shake the reality away. She simply couldn’t believe it. That by saving her he had
actually, knowingly put himself in line for a consequence this severe. So much was kept hidden about the Angels, about how they handled their
internal affairs—brutally, it turned out. All the while they put on a smooth, clean exterior for the public and the media.
“What can I do?” she said finally.
Jacks looked at her through the deluge.
“Come with me.”
There he stood in the pouring rain, the image of shirtless soaked perfection. He stood before her offering her a choice just like he had the
night they went flying. She was at another crossroads. She knew she could just leave. Knew she probably should. But they were going to take his
wings, and it was all her fault. Her fault for going to the party, her fault for trying to follow through with her plan, her fault for leaving and insisting on
walking home. Could she really leave him now? Before she had even decided, her mouth opened.
“Yes,” she said. Just like when he had invited her to the party. It simply came out, as though her true desires could no longer be repressed.
Jacks smiled a dripping, radiant smile. A flash of lightning lit the roof, followed closely by a bark of thunder.”
“A new legend swept Oregon, from Roseburg all the way north to the Columbia, from the mountains to the sea. It traveled by letter and by word of mouth, growing with each telling.
It was a sadder story than the two that had come before it--those speaking of a wise, benevolent machine and of a reborn nation. It was more disturbing than those. And yet this new fable had one important element its predecessors lacked.
It was true.
The story told of a band of forty women--crazy women, many contended--who had shared among themselves a secret vow; to do anything and everything to end a terrible war, and end it before all the good men died trying to save them.
They acted out of love, some explained. Others said they did it for their country.
There was even a rumor that the women had looked on their odyssey to Hell as a form of penance, in order to make up for some past failing of womankind.
Interpretations varied, but the overall moral was always the same, whether spread by word of mouth or by U.S. Mail. From hamlet to village to farmstead, mothers and daughter and wives read the letters and listened to the words--and passed them on.”
“Your heart, the compassionate part of you, knows that it’s impossible to feel better at the expense of someone else.”
“She’d never had feelings about any man that were important enough to be real romantic love. Affection, lust, yes those things. Instants in time with someone that had touched her, yes that too. But she found no one for romance that she could look up to, that was real , an individual that wasn’t made up of bits and pieces of clichés, buffeted about on the tide of their wants and the opinions of others, no goal, no point of view that they understood themselves why they held it.
She had researched him when she was assigned to protect him, she told him.
She had not understood in the
beginning.
“You were a man that had it all! Worthy and courageous military action; you grew up, came of age in war. A successful career, status in letters, a full professorship at a prestigious university if you wanted it. Accrued wealth and income enough to live however you wanted. Beautiful women in your life … you do not show the full measure of your years in either looks or fitness.
“You were a full fledged member of the oligarchy, though at a modest level. Yet you threw it all away! You started your novel, became a thorn in the side of the establishment,” she told him. “I didn’t understand until I read the fragment of manuscript that you had Jean Augereau print out for you. You were on a crusade … totally focused! I saw that you were something special then,” she told him, “That’s when you began to become very special to me!”
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