WALL

“Sometimes while i watched the waves roll along the piers, i secretly prayed that the sea would mend Baba’s broken heart—the way it was slowly healing mine.”

“Learn from my mistakes,” she said, so softly I had to lean close to hear, “and learn from my joys. Surround yourself with those who’ll love you always, through your mistakes and your faults. Make a family that will find you more beautiful everyday, even when your hair is white with age. Be the light that makes someone’s lantern shine.”

“My parents think of marriage as a duty to one’s family and country,” Takkan said, by way of response. “I think of it as a duty to one’s heart. Food feeds the belly, thoughts feed the mind, but the love is what feeds the heart. I hoped, with my letters, that Shiori and I might grow to make each other’s hearts full. That we might be happy together.”

“I’m not afraid of anything. How often I had uttered the same words. But they were always a lie, and I had a feeling Seryu was lying, too”

“Find the light that makes your lantern shine,” she used to say. “Hold on to it, even when the dark surrounds you. Not even the strongest wind will blow out the flame.”

“According to the stories, she looked so beautiful when she was in pain that no one realized she was wasting away from a heart disease until one day she collapsed in the garden, fingers clawing futilely at her snow-white chest. In the old stories, that counted as romance.”

“Don’t go to those grottoes, Nezha.” He sounded very tired then. “Don’t take on the burden of an entire nation. It’s too heavy. And you aren’t strong enough.”

“We loved Riga,” Daji said, unfazed. “And if we ever feared him, it was because he was great, and great rulers always inspire fear in the hearts of the weak”

“War didn’t end, not so cleanly— it just kept building up in little hurts that piled on one another until they exploded afresh into raw new wounds”

“It doesn’t go away. It never will. But when it hurts, lean into it. It’s so much harder to stay alive. That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to live. It means you’re brave.”

“Do you know what your problem is?” Daji asked. “You’ve been fighting this entire war on the defensive. You’re still thinking like someone on the run. But it’s time you started thinking like a ruler.”

“She tried to find comfort in that thought, but the uncertainty of not knowing, only hurt more.”

“You don’t fix hurt by pretending they never happened. You treat them like infected wounds. You dig deep with a burning knife and gouge out the rotten flesh and then, maybe, you have a chance to heal”

“Souji knew that she wasn’t thrilled with this tentative campaign—this sort of half fighting, of provoking from the shadows instead of facing the enemy head-on. It defied every strategic principle she’d ever been taught. She’d been taught to win, and to win conclusively to preempt a later counter attack. Souji, on the other hand, flirted with victory but never took the spoils. He left chess pieces open all over board, like a dog might bury bones to savor later”

“See, they’re bullies. Weakness is what they want to see. They’re so convinced that we’re just base, cowardly animals, they won’t stop to question it. They don’t want to believe we can fight back, so they won’t”

“She was finding it easier and easier to cut him off. She’d learned now to divide her mind into clean, convenient compartments. Thoughts could be blocked. Memories suppressed. Life was so much easier when she blockaded off the part of her that agonized over what she’d done. And as long as she kept those parts of her mind seperate—the part that felt pain and the part that fought wars—then she would be all right.”