The Darkening

It's always worth being the enemy of a diseased state.

If nightmares had music, they'd sound like the Storm.

It wasn't bravery, my dear. Nothing of the sort.' 'What, then?' 'Fury.

Blood isn't a leash, love. Your choice is yours.

But love is such an insignificant word for the potential that purrs within me, an ability to accept and to give and forgive; a transformative power to turn villains into penitents, sufferers into the healed, the abandoned into family. "pg. 276

It takes something from you. Something you can never get back. Not the magic itself, but the power. To affect the world with a word? With just a symbol? It makes men greedy. They begin to think they can rewrite fate. That they can hold the very sun in their hands." Pg29

To do the one good thing that I must do, I find myself caught in a thousand small evils." I squeeze his hand until he looks at me. "I hope that one thing is worth it." "It is the only thing that matters.

What Pa did doesn't represent all of who he is. There's a bigger picture. Amma said something to me once, when I found a drawing someone had done of her when she was a teenager: In life we wear a hundred faces - the bawling infant, the happy child, the starry-eyed youth. Each face belongs to a different life. I didn't fully understand it then. But maybe I do now. A lifetime is made up of dozens of lives, tied together only by shared memory. Who I was when I was a baby isn't the same person I was at age ten, much less who I am now. Who Pa was in his twenties isn't the same man he is today. And I have to believe that the man he is today shouldn't have to die for the mistakes of the other man who wore his face twelve years ago.

Dalca's not my North Star. He doesn't give my life meaning. But I won't loose him." - pg308