“It's our choices that matter in the end. Not wishes, not words, not promises.”
“You cannot fathom the distance I would travel for you.”
“In the whole course of history, war had always fallen on the shoulders of the young.”
“Good ideas had in the dark were generally best left there.”
“The only way out is through.”
“It matters not who you love, but only the quality of such a love. A flower is no less beautiful because it does not bloom in the expected form. Because it lasts an hour, and not days.”
“There are rules, but rules may be rewritten if only one hand holds the ink.”
“She didn't need a protector or a rescuer. But she did need him.”
“I've never slapped anyone before,” she admitted.
“How did you find the experience?”
“It would have been more satisfying if he'd gone flying out of his seat like I imagined.”
“Love was selfish, wasn't it? It made honest men want things they had no right to. It cocooned one from the rest of the world, erased time itself, knocked away reason. It made you live in defiance of the inevitable. It made you want another's mind, body; it made you feel as if you deserved to own their heart, and carve out a place in it.”
“What a privilege it was to never feel like you had to take stock of your surroundings, or gauge everyone’s reactions to the color of your skin.”
“I love you.” For whatever small comfort it was worth, he would have the truth between them now. “Most desperately. Bloody inconvenient, that.”
“How do you fight against a mountain? How do you move it when you don't even have a shovel?”
“Maybe you don't have to move it,” Etta said, folding the gown over the lid of the trunk. “Maybe you have to climb it.”
“He would not surrender to the disaster of loving her.”
“This was the danger, the seduction of time travel, she realized—it was the opportunity, the freedom of a thousand possibilities of where to live and how to start over. It was the beauty open to you in your life if you only stopped for a moment to look.”
“So you'd keep me here against my will—”
“Know this pirate,” he said, his hands gripping the railing, “You are my passenger, and I will be damned before I let any harm come to you.”
“You do have a choice, you know,” Etta told her after a moment. “There is always a choice.”
“Society is always the same, regardless of the era. There are rules and standards, with seemingly no purpose. It's a hateful, elaborate charade, equal parts flirtation and perceived naïveté. To men we have the minds of children.”
“But she wondered if, in moving outside of the natural flow of time, they had forgotten the most crucial point of life—that it wasn’t meant to be lived for the past, or even the future, but for each present moment.”
“Oh my God you are despicable!” Etta snarled.
“Careful, madam, blasphemy is still a sin—”
Even if Nicholas had been the gambling sort, he never would have wagered a single coin on her next words being “Then I guess I'll see you in hell!”
“Nicholas felt a rueful smile spread across his face. And a curse be on him for it, because now he knew her. She'd shown him her mind, and she'd opened up her heart, and now he knew the taste of her tears. And he was wrecked.”
“Rest assured,” he said, when he managed to find his voice, “there will always be a position for you on my ship.”
Her face brightened with her clever, beautiful smile. “Will you let me climb up into the rigging? Reef the sails?”
A burst of thunder rolled through him. “Absolutely not.”
She laughed again. “As if you could stop me.”
“I wish you'd go a a little easier on him,” she said.
“He came in here thrashing a sword around. Was I supposed to stand idly by and do nothing?” he huffed.
“Well, you weren't supposed to try and rearrange his face with your fist.”
“I wasn't,” Nicholas protested. “He lunged up into it several times. I was only in the way.”
“You're ridiculous.”
“Free the fire fluttering inside her rib cage. Work her muscles, the bow, the violin, until she played herself to ash and embers and left the rest of the world behind to smolder.”
“Having actually read the Voltaire in question, I can confirm the quote is, as different from ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds,” Nicholas said coldly. “Interesting, though, that in the end we're all just dogs.”
“A snake could shed its skin, but never change its color.”
“Half-truths only added up to a whole lie.”
“What good is honour when greed eats away at its foundations?”
“How about a kiss, hey?” Etta liked that she was still able to startle him, just a little. The blank look of concentration broke as he barked out a laugh. “I don't know if that's a wise idea. We'd never leave.”
“All I hear are Satan's hammers and the war drums of hell, thank you.”
“Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it's worth.”
“It's Annie and me they're all sitting around here like cardboard people judging; It's Annie and me. And what we did that they think is wrong, when you pare it all down, was fall in love.”
“Dan gestured past Neil toward the changing room. "What happened?" Neil counted it off on his fingers. "Kevin told them Coach is his father, said he's never going back to Edgar Allan, and called the Ravens out as two-faced assholes. Oh," he said, looking up from his hand, "and he said his injury wasn't an accident. Not in so many words, but it won't take them long to figure out what he meant." Dan gaped. "He what?" "Great," Wymack said. "He's turning into another you. That's just what I needed.”
“Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.”
“At every new torment which is too hard to bear we feel yet another vein protrude, to unroll its sinuous and deadly length along our temples or beneath our eyes. And thus gradually are formed those terrible ravaged faces, of the old Rembrandt, the old Beethoven, at whom the whole world mocked. And the pockets under the eyes and the wrinkled forehead would not matter much were there not also the suffering of the heart. But since strength of one kind can change into a strength of another kind, since heat which is stored up can become light and the electricity in a flash of lightning can cause a photograph to be taken, since the dull pain in our heart can hoist above itself like a banner the visible permanence of an image for every new grief, let us accept the physical injury which is done to us for the sake of the spiritual knowledge which grief brings; let us submit to the disintegration of our body, since each new fragment which breaks away from it returns in a luminous and significant form to add itself to our work, to complete it at the price of sufferings of which others more richly endowed have no need, to make our work at least more solid as our life crumbles away beneath the corrosive action of our emotions.”
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