There is no such thing as bad people

There is no such thing as bad people is the moral maxim Ryle Kincaid gives Lily Bloom on their first rooftop conversation: people are not permanently reducible to goodness or evil, even though they sometimes do terrible things. The rule becomes one of the novel’s most persistent expressions, shaping Lily’s floral-shop aesthetic, her interpretation of Ryle’s violence, and her struggle to distinguish compassion for a person from permission for that person’s conduct. Its decisive significance lies in that tension: the sentence can resist simplistic condemnation, but it can also help someone remain loyal to an abuser until Lily finally recognizes that understanding a person does not erase the consequences of what that person does.

Definition and First Formulation

The maxim emerges when Lily describes her father’s abuse of her mother. Andrew Bloom became violently angry during arguments, then spent the following week or two compensating for the assault with flowers, dinners, and gifts, including presents for Lily because he knew the children suffered when their parents fought. Lily admits the disturbing effect of that cycle: as a child, she sometimes looked forward to the nights of conflict because the violence was followed by a period of material comfort. The pattern became normal within the household, and as she grew older she felt guilty for not stopping it.

That history leads Lily to wonder whether her father is simply a bad person and whether her own failure to intervene makes her equally guilty. Ryle answers by separating identity from action. He tells her that there are no bad people, only people who sometimes do bad things. Lily is struck silent because the formulation challenges the moral division she has relied on to understand Andrew Bloom and herself. In her immediate reflection, no one is exclusively good or exclusively bad; some people merely have to work harder to suppress what is harmful in them.

A Rule Reused in Lily’s Life

Lily carries the maxim into the creation of Lily Bloom’s floral shop. When Allysa Kincaid worries that Lily’s proposed dark flowers, leather, silver chains, black onyx, and purple velvet will make the shop seem bleak, Lily explains that the store should give customers not only what they expect but also what they do not yet know they want. The theme becomes a visual translation of the maxim: beauty and darkness should coexist rather than be separated into innocent and corrupted categories. Lily imagines dark purple walls with black accents and unconventional arrangements instead of pastel flowers in conventional crystal vases, calling the concept brave and bold.

The shop therefore turns an abstract moral idea into an aesthetic principle. Flowers associated with life and celebration are not denied, but they are placed beside darker materials and moods. Lily’s design treats contradiction as part of reality, just as the maxim treats moral contradiction as part of human nature. The rule is not initially presented as an excuse; it is a way of acknowledging that people contain both good and evil and that a meaningful life cannot be organized into perfectly pure categories.

From Compassion to Rationalization

After the kitchen incident, the maxim becomes entangled with Lily’s attempt to forgive Ryle. Ryle pushes Lily after burning his hand, and his apology echoes the apology Lily remembers from Andrew Bloom after he hurt Jenny Bloom. Lily hears her father’s voice in Ryle’s explanation that the violence was an accident and that he is sorry. The repetition connects the present assault to the intergenerational pattern that Lily believed she would avoid.

Lily knows what her lifelong rule was supposed to be: if a man treated her as Andrew Bloom treated Jenny Bloom, she would leave. Yet she does not leave immediately. Bruised and cut, she instead tries to justify the incident by emphasizing that Ryle thought she was cheating, that he was hurt and angry, and that he apologized. She feels more pain for Ryle’s childhood suffering than for herself, and the maxim helps her interpret him as a damaged human being rather than a monster. She reasons that Ryle is not identical to her father because he has disclosed his past, expressed remorse, and is trying to become better.

The distinction contains a genuine ethical insight but also a perilous blind spot. Lily tells herself that she and Ryle are individuals in a different situation, that Andrew Bloom had no excuse for his anger, and that Ryle’s immediate remorse makes the episode less severe. She repeats the maxim to Ryle directly, telling him that he is not a bad person and can still protect her by walking away whenever he becomes upset. She offers a shared plan in which both partners leave the situation until they are calm and then return to the conversation. Her appeal treats responsibility as possible because Ryle remains human, but it also places part of the burden for preventing his violence onto the relationship itself.

The Maxim Under Pressure

The rule’s limitations become clearer as Lily confronts the repetition of abuse. She had believed that the first incident would be singular, yet the maxim gives her a language for preserving the image of the loving husband alongside the image of the man who harmed her. The fact that Ryle can be tender, remorseful, and wounded does not cancel the bruises and cuts he caused. His humanity is precisely what makes the situation difficult: Lily is not deciding whether to love a fictional monster, but whether love can coexist with conduct that has made the marriage unsafe.

Lily later describes the psychological pull of that contradiction to Jenny Bloom. When she misses Ryle, she tells herself that perhaps the violence was not so bad and that she might endure him at his worst in order to keep him at his best. She recognizes that outsiders often call women who return to abusive relationships stupid or weak, but she now understands that love can be the reason they go back. Forgiving someone loved is harder than she once imagined, and the maxim’s refusal to define Ryle as wholly evil helps explain why separation is emotionally harder than an outsider’s moral judgment suggests.

At the same time, Lily begins to see the danger of losing sight of a limit. Jenny warns her not to allow grief for the good parts of the relationship to erase the boundary that should govern her decisions. This is the maxim’s crucial counterweight: a person may not be wholly bad, but an action can still establish a limit, and repeated harm can still demand departure. The rule survives only when it is separated from the demand to remain available to the person who causes the harm.

Narrative and Ethical Significance

The maxim links Lily’s family history to her marriage and makes the kitchen incident a deliberate echo of Andrew Bloom’s first assault on Jenny Bloom. The author’s note confirms that the scene was modeled on the first time her father struck her mother while she was cooking a casserole: he had been drinking, removed the dish without a pot holder, and hit her after she laughed. Jenny forgave that incident because his remorse seemed believable, and the later assaults followed the same pattern of apology and promises. The parallel shows how violence can pass between generations not only as an act, but also as a story about the act: an accident, an exception, a mistake made by a fundamentally good man.

The maxim consequently operates as both humane philosophy and narrative trap. It resists the comforting idea that abuse is committed only by people who are visibly and permanently evil. It also exposes why cycles of violence are so difficult to break: the person who harms another may retain loving qualities, express genuine regret, and have suffered earlier violence himself. None of those facts makes the harm unreal. Lily’s eventual moral work is not to decide that Ryle has no humanity, but to refuse the false conclusion that his humanity obliges her to keep sacrificing her safety.

The statement is repeated beyond Lily and Ryle’s conversations, including in the acknowledgments as a formulation of the lesson that people are capable of doing bad things without being reducible to a single evil essence. Its recurrence gives the phrase the force of a refrain. Each return changes its meaning: first it offers Lily a new way to judge her father and herself, then it helps her beautify contradiction through the shop, then it supports her attempt to forgive Ryle, and finally it stands beside the recognition that love, remorse, and complexity cannot substitute for accountability. The rule’s mature implication is not that bad actions should be excused, but that moral judgment must hold two truths at once: a person can be more than the worst thing done, and the worst thing done can still be enough to require a boundary.