Burning Mind Quotes

But then she remembered something else, just a flash: looking up at Damon’s face in the woods and feeling such—such excitement, such affinity with him. As if he understood the flame that burned inside her as nobody else ever could. As if together they could do anything they liked, conquer the world or destroy it; as if they were better than anyone else who had ever lived. I was out of my mind, irrational, she told herself, but that little flash of memory wouldn’t go away. And then she remembered something else: how Damon had acted later that night, how he’d kept her safe, even been gentle with her. Stefan was looking at her, and his expression had changed from belligerence to bitter anger and fear. Part of her wanted to reassure him completely, to throw her arms around him and tell him that she was his and always would be and that nothing else mattered. Not the town, not Damon, not anything. But she wasn’t doing it.

See me. See me for who I am. I am magic. I am human. I am inhuman. See me. I am a boy. I am a girl. I am everything and nothing in between. See me. You do. You see me. You recoil in fear. You scream in anger. See me. I bleed. I ache. You see me, and you wish you hadn’t. You wish I was invisible. Out of sight, out of mind. Unseen, faded, muted. You want my color. You want my joy. You want a monochrome world with monochrome beliefs. You see me, and you want to take it all away. But you can’t. You want me lost, but I am found in the breaths I take, in the spaces between heartbeats. I am found because I refuse to be in black and white, or any shade of gray. I am color. I am fire. I am the sun, and I will burn away the shadows until only light remains. And then you will have no choice but to see me.

Tarwater clenched his fists. He stood like one condemned waiting at the spot of execution. Then the revelation came, silent, implacable, direct as a bullet. He did not look in the eyes of any fiery beast or see a burning bush. He only knew, with a certainty sunk in despair, that he was expected to baptize that child he saw and begin the life his great-uncle prepared for him. He knew that he was called to be a prophet and that the ways of his prophecy would not be remarkable. His black pupils, glassy and still, reflected depth on depth his own stricken image of himself, trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus, until at last he received his reward, a broken fish, a multiplied loaf. The Lord out of dust had created him, had made him blood and nerve and mind, had made him to bleed and weep and think, and set him in a world of loss and fire to baptize one idiot child that he need not have created in the first place and to cry out a gospel just as foolish. He tried to shout, “NO!” but it was like trying to shout in his sleep. The sound was saturated in silence, lost.