Love, the deadliest of all things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don't. But that isn't it, exactly. The condemner and the condemned. The executioner; the blade; the last-minute reprieve; the gasping breath and the rolling sky above you and the thank you, thank you, thank you God. Love: It will kill you and save you, both.

Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.

Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you.

My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it's the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once.

I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.

Now, after so many years, I understand what the Coldness was and where it came from—this sense that everything is lost, and worthless, and meaningless.

That's the easy thing about falling: there is only one choice after that.