Home > Work > This Is How You Lose the Time War
21 " I want to meet you in every place I ever loved. Listen to me. I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you. "
― Amal El-Mohtar , This Is How You Lose the Time War
22 " But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me.I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together. "
23 " I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you. "
24 " I love you and I love you and I love you, on battlefields, in shadows, in fading ink, on cold ice splashed with the blood of seals. In the rings of trees. In the wreckage of a planet crumbling to space. In bubbling water. In bee stings and dragonfly wings, in stars. In the deapths of lonely woods where I wandered in my youth, staring up - and even then you watched me. You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you. "
25 " And everyone is alive, somewhere in time. "
26 " Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down. "
27 " Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all. "
28 " Sometimes when you write, you say things I stopped myself from saying. "
29 " Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere. "
30 " It's amazing how much blue there is in the world if you look. You're different colors of flame. Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things. "
31 " Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself. "
32 " To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside "
33 " PS. I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the act, in the palm of your hand, dying. "
34 " So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am. "
35 " I would have fought you forever. I would have wrestled you through time. I would have turned you, and been turned. "
36 " Red rarely sleeps, but when she does, she lies still, eyes closed in the dark, and lets herself see lapis, taste iris petals and ice, hear a blue jay's shriek. She collects blues and keeps them. "
37 " You are yourself, and so remain, as I remain. "
38 " It’s not that I never noticed before how many red things there are in the world. It’s that they were never any more relevant to me than green or white or gold. Now it’s as if the whole world sings to me in petals, feathers, pebbles, blood. "
39 " I have observed friendships as one observes high holy days: breathtakingly short, whirlwinds of intimate behavior, frenzied carousing, the sharing of food, of wine, of honey. Compressed, always, and gone as soon as they come. "
― Max Gladstone , This Is How You Lose the Time War
40 " Words can wound, but they're bridges too. Like the bridges that are all the Genghis left behind. Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound "