It's just that it's impossible to be a broken or whole person. You can only be a person. You can only exist, you can only belong to yourself, and you can only be responsible for your own happiness or belonging or whatever. That broken-part-piece-whole thing is just a trick of the mortal mind.

Maybe all you can do, when your world is burning, is hold on to the thing you love the most.

How could I possibly try to pretend the sunlight doesn’t exist, now that it’s taken so much of me?

This is why Caliban was a punishment. I realize it now - it's a beautiful, perfect world of nothingness. No connection, no longing, no . . . love. A world we're trapped in until we're needed here, a world we're condemned to while everyone we might care about forgets us.

I became an ifrit to save the lives of my fellow jinn. What kind of life saver would I be if I let you sit here and wither away in paradise? Just an obstacle. Just an obstacle. I meet the ifrit's eyes. What happened to all your talk about birds and fish having nowhere to live? The ifrit shrugs. I suggest you start holding your breath, my friend, he says, then pushes through the hearing room doors.

I wanted to know what it was like to be a drug addict, and have an eating disorder, and have a loved one die, and fall in love. I saw my friends going through these things, I saw the world going through these things, and I needed to understand them. I needed to make sense of them. Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books, and it was books that showed me there is light at the end of the tunnel.

The cruelest thing, hope, the way it strings you along, the way it makes you believe.