“You can't pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.”
This quote talks about how your home and your family are the only permanent structures in your life. You do not get to decide the class or race or other identities of the family you are born into. Other things come and go, but you family and home stay, for better or worse. Often, this also determines your fate in life.
“Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it's gone, nothing is whole again.”
These lines talk about how love is a force so intense that once it enters your life, nothing's the same anymore. Love changes how you live, how your body responds to things, and how you feel about every single thing. When it is absent, you might not recognise its absence, but if it leaves or is taken away after being deeply felt, it’s absence is felt forever. It’s absence leaves a person feeling empty and hollow.
“Sometimes when you like where you end up, you don’t care how you got there.”
The dichotomy of weighing the journey or the end result as the more important one is widely debated. This line falls on the side of considering the end result as the most important, irrespective of how one got there. If one is happy with the destination they have reached, it is difficult to mull over the less-than-happy things that might have been a part of the journey.
“I don’t believe that blood makes a family; kin is the circle you create, hands held tight.”
While blood relations tie you to a certain set of people genetically, they are not always the people who are your true family. Family can be chosen or created. Kin, or family, can comprise the friends you associate with, and trust with your life. As the saying goes, “blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb” which means that blood shed, truly or metaphorically, over shared struggles creates a bond stronger than that of just genetics.
“You can never really unlove somebody. Maybe it changes shape, but it’s there.”
Once you love someone, it never goes away. The kind of love, the expression of it, or it’s metaphorical shape may change, but it remains in some way or the other. For example, romantic love may over time morph into a love between friends but it doesn’t get erased.
“When a spectral voice says, get out, you should do it. But in real life, you don't know that you're in a scary movie.”
It is easy to reflect on an incident and see the warning signs retrospectively, and identify the points at which making a different decision or exiting the story could have led to different results. However, in the moment, one is too absorbed in their life to notice these signs and take appropriate action. So, even when the warning signs are clear, such as a spectral voice telling you to leave, you ignore it.
