The Atlas Paradox (Atlas Series Book 2)

We can’t help clinging to our origins, Callum said. The past always seems more ordered, Rhodes. It always seems clearer, more straightforward, easier to understand. We have a craving for it, that sense of simplicity, but only an idiot would ever chase the past, because our perception of it is false—it was never that the world was simple. Just that

his projection-self postured on. “Do you think they know what it really means to love?” his projection-self mused aloud to him. “That it isn’t the simple joy of fondness, I mean. In fact it’s violent, destructive. It means to cut the heart out of your chest and give it to someone else.”

Reina already knew each of these works to contain similar themes: humans granted immortality by the gods for their greatness. (A reflection of a general, species-long aversion to the unknown abyss beyond death.)

This is what it means to be a god: to enforce a new era of change.

Jung said the self was the sum total of a person’s psyche. The part that looked forward, the process of individuation, the quest to become something more.

He now believed the desire to live to be more than philosophy, more than psychology, but rather, a primordial principle of physics.

one thing Parisa had come to learn was that other people’s view of her said far more about them than it ever did about her.

(If you do not know precisely where impossibility begins and ends, then of course it cannot constrain you.)

Reina Mori had not yet realized that people had a maddening tendency to be precisely what they were in the most unpredictable, erratic way possible.

“The idea that everyone is born with access to some larger, interconnected subconscious. Something we share as a species, instead of something determined for us as individuals.”