163
" How’s your speech?” Nico asked, and she rolled her eyes.
“Like I’d discuss it with you.”
“Why on earth not? I know you get stage fright.”
“I do not get—” Another breath. Two breaths, for good measure. “I do not get stage fright,” she managed, more evenly this time, “and even if I did, what exactly would you do to help me?”
“Oh, did you think I was offering to help?” Nico asked. “Apologies, I was not. "
― Olivie Blake , The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)
166
" Most people don’t know how to starve,” said Ezra.
Silence.
“I guess that’s a weird thing to say, but it’s true. It’s something you learn. People think they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn or whatever. Either you are or you aren’t, that sort of thing. Like some people naturally want things and others want nothing, but it’s not true. You can be taught to want. You can be taught to crave. And you can also learn to starve.”
Silence.
“The issue is when you eventually get fed,” Ezra continued. “You’ve heard about the stomach pains and shit when vegetarians eat meat for the first time? It feels like dying. Prosperity is anguish. And of course the body adjusts, doesn’t it? But the mind doesn’t. You can’t erase history. You can’t just excise the wanting, and worse—you forget the pain. Eventually you grow accustomed to excess and can’t go back, because all you remember are the aches of starvation, which you took so long to learn. How to give yourself only as much as you need to continue—that’s a lesson. For some people it’s lifelong, for others it’s developmental if they’re lucky and then eventually it fades. But you never really forget it, how to starve. How to watch others with envy. How to silence the ache in your soul. Starvation is dormancy, isn’t it? The mind still hungers even when the body adjusts. There’s tension, always. Survival only requires so much but existence, completion, that becomes insatiable. The longer you starve the more haunting the ghost of starvation. After you’ve learned to starve, when someone finally gives you something, you become a hoarder. You hoard. And technically that’s the same as having, but it isn’t, not really. Starvation continues. You still want, and wanting is the hard part. You can learn to starve but you can’t learn to have. Nobody can. It’s the flaw in being mortal. "
― Olivie Blake , The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)
168
" Most people don’t know how to starve,” said Ezra.
Silence.
“I guess that’s a weird thing to say, but it’s true. It’s something you learn. People think they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn or whatever. Either you are or you aren’t, that sort of thing. Like some people naturally want things and others want nothing, but it’s not true. You can be taught to want. You can be taught to crave. And you can also learn to starve.”
Silence.
“The issue is when you eventually get fed,” Ezra continued. “You’ve heard about the stomach pains and shit when vegetarians eat meat for the first time? It feels like dying. Prosperity is anguish. And of course the body adjusts, doesn’t it? But the mind doesn’t. You can’t erase history. You can’t just excise the wanting, and worse—you forget the pain. Eventually you grow accustomed to excess and can’t go back, because all you remember are the aches of starvation, which you took so long to learn. How to give yourself only as much as you need to continue—that’s a lesson. For some people it’s lifelong, for others it’s developmental if they’re lucky and then eventually it fades. But you never really forget it, how to starve. How to watch others with envy. How to silence the ache in your soul. Starvation is dormancy, isn’t it? The mind still hungers even when the body adjusts. There’s tension, always. Survival only requires so much but existence, completion, that becomes insatiable. The longer you starve the more haunting the ghost of starvation. After you’ve learned to starve, when someone finally gives you something, you become a hoarder. You hoard. And technically that’s the same as having, but it isn’t, not really. Starvation continues. You still want, and wanting is the hard part. You can learn to starve but you can’t learn to have. Nobody can. It’s the flaw in being mortal. “
Silence.
“Being magic is even worse,” said Ezra. “Your body doesn’t want to die, it has too much inside it. So you want more powerfully. You starve more quickly. Your capacity to have nothing is abysmal, cataclysmic. There isn’t a medeian on earth capable of casting themselves down into ordinariness, much less to dust. We’re all starving, but not everyone is doing it correctly. Some people are taking too much, making themselves sick, and it kills them. The excess is poison; even food is a poison to someone who’s been deprived. Everything has the capacity to turn toxic. It’s so fucking easy to die, so the ones who make themselves something are the same ones who learn to starve correctly. They take in small amounts, in survivable doses. We’re immunizing ourselves to something— against something. Everything we manage to have successfully becomes a vaccine over time, but the illness is always much larger. We’re still naturally susceptible. We fight it, trying to starve well or starve cleverly, but it comes for us eventually. We all have different reasons for wanting, but inevitably it comes.
“What does?” asked Atlas.
Ezra smiled, closing his eyes to the sun.
“Power,” he said. “A little at a time until we break. "
― Olivie Blake , The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)
170
" As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely.
The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste.
Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved. "
― Olivie Blake , The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)
177
" As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely.
The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste.
Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved.
Callum had always tended toward the assassins in the stories, the dutiful soldiers, those driven by personal reaction rather than on some larger moral cause. Perhaps it was a small role to serve on the whole, but at least it was rational, comprehensible beyond fatalistic. Take the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White, for example. An assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether humanity as a whole won or lost as a result of his choice? Unimportant. He didn’t raise an army, didn’t fight for good, didn’t interfere much with the queen’s other evils. It wasn’t the whole world at stake; it was never about destiny. Callum admired that, the ability to take a moral stance and hold it. It was only about whether the huntsman could live with his decision—because however miserable or dull or uninspired, life was the only thing that mattered in the end.
The truest truths: Mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In terms of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself. "
― Olivie Blake , The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)
178
" You want to believe that your hesitation makes you good, makes you better? It doesn’t. Every single one of us is missing something. We are all too powerful, too extraordinary, and don’t you see it’s because we’re riddled with vacancies? We are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal— that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn.”
He pivoted as one hand fell to his side, exasperated.
“We are medeians because we will never have enough,” Callum said hoarsely. “We aren’t normal; we are gods born with pain built in. We are incendiary beings and we are flawed, except the weaknesses we pretend to have are not our true weaknesses at all. We are not soft, we do not suffer impairment or frailty—we imitate it. We tell ourselves we have it. But our only real weakness is that we know we are bigger, stronger, as close to omnipotence as we can be, and we are hungry, we are aching for it. Other people can see their limits, Tristan, but we have none. We want to find our impossible edges, to close our fingers around constraints that don’t exist, and that—” Callum exhaled. “That is what will drive us to madness.”
Tristan glanced down at his forgotten toast, suddenly depleted.
Callum’s voice didn’t soften. “You don’t want to go mad? Too bad, you are already. If you leave here the madness will only follow you. You’ve already gone too far, and so have I. "
― Olivie Blake , The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)
180
" For the rest of the day, Tristan felt dazed. He felt drained, as if he’d suffered a wound that hadn’t clotted. The constant questioning of himself, of others, was viciously acute. It was one thing to be understood by someone else, to be exposed by them, and another (however inevitable it was) to be misused by them. Both Parisa and Callum had seen pieces of Tristan that he either didn’t or couldn’t understand; both fundamentally distrusted the other. What, then, had they seen in him that they could use to their advantage? He was caving in on himself beneath the weight of his doubt, uncertain.
Nothing was concrete anymore. Time did not exist and neither did infinity. "
― Olivie Blake , The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)
