palabras.

That would never happen.

When it came to love - so called - I considered myself particularly accomplished in the art of amputating body from heart.

What Sam loved best was being alone with Sadie and filling a blank slate with their grand ideas. He loved building a world with her.

No, Sam had said, you don’t understand. It’s the principle. She was pretending to be my friend, but she was just doing it for community service. Marx had looked at Sam blankly, and then he said, No one spends hundreds of hours doing anything out of charity, Sam. Thinking of this and looking at the little paperweight, Sam’s heart swelled with love for Sadie. Why was it so hard for him to say he loved her even when she said it to him? He knew he loved her. People who felt far less for each other said “love” all the time, and it didn’t mean a thing. And maybe that was the point. He more than loved Sadie Green. There needed to be another word for it.

There are, he determines, infinite ways his mother doesn’t die that night and only one way she does.

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

As Sadie spoke, Sam was reminded of a winter afternoon, many years ago, and of commuters clogging up the train station, blocking his path. At the time, they’d seemed like impediments to him, but maybe he’d been thinking of them the wrong way. What makes a person want to shiver in a train station for nothing more than the promise of a secret image? But then, what makes a person drive down an unmarked road in the middle of the night? Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans. Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from dispair.

She thought about what Melinda had told her - everything mattered, but nothing was fixed. Melinda hadn’t been talking about time travel, Melinda had never talked about time travel, Alice thought, because Melinda was a sensible, grounded person, but it was good advice. All the tiny pieces added together to make a life, but the pieces could always be rearranged.

These two women were talking about these characters that her father had invented as if they were real, because they were. Sometimes people didn’t understand that - Alice wasn’t a writer, but she’d spent enough time sitting at dinner tables with novelists to understand that fiction was a myth. Fictional stories, that is. Maybe there were bad ones out there, but the good ones, the good ones - those were always true. Not the facts, not the rights and the lefts, not the plots, which could take place in outer space or in hell or anywhere in between, but the feelings. The feelings were the truth.

New York City didn’t stop, either. That was another banner that could hang across a city street - the number of places you loved that were gone and had been replaced by different versions of themselves, places that someone else would love and remember long after you were dead.

The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water.

Marsh obviously didn’t care about his companion’s inner struggles. The Inquisitor turned and began to walk along the rim of the crater.

“At first glance, the key and the lock it fits may seem very different,” Sazed said. “Different in shape, different in function, different in design. The man who looks at them without knowledge of their true nature might think them opposites, for one is meant to open, and the other to keep closed. Yet upon closer examination, he might see that without one, the other becomes useless. The wise man then knows that both lock and key were created for the same purpose.”

“What are you doing?” Vin demanded.

“Going with you,” Allrianne said.

…

“We don’t want you along,” Vin said. “We don’t trust you - and we don’t like you.”

Elend closed his eyes. Dear, blunt Vin.

If you want to be good at burning tin, she thought, translating as best she could, learn to deal with distraction. It isn’t about what you see — it’s about what you can ignore.

They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.