caromelon

[caromelon]

You know why Merlin McGee only predicts natural disasters? Because he’s lazy and they’re easy. They’re constants across the many branching futures, well outside our influence. It doesn’t matter which way we zig or zag. It’s still going to rain in Nemeth tomorrow.

Flight of the Silvers by Daniel Price

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But sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a person who is in the process of changing.

Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson

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When you take time to savor the good, you simply need less of it.

What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo

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This time of year is depressing. New Year’s Eve is a bigger thug than any mugger, the way it makes people feel. Being old is depressing. The Subway Vigilante is depressing. But I love it here, this big rotten apple.

When it came to love - so called - I considered myself particularly accomplished in the art of amputating body from heart.

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney

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The way to defeat a chess master was not with greater genius, but by forcing her to play a different game.

Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee

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What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn’t live until it is imagined in someone’s mind.

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

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Something I love about New York is that nobody belongs here, so everyone does. In my experience, the only people who don’t feel like they belong in New York are people for whom belonging was never an issue. They don’t get why it’s so important to have this place, because having a place was never difficult for them.

My Inner Sky by Mari Andrew

[caromelon]

Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you’re going to behave, I shan’t bring you again.

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

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“Even if what he says is true, I think it’s still a victory,” she said. “Because she won on this day, with this particular set of people. We can never know what else might have happened had other competitors been there. The Russian girls could have won, or they could have gotten jet-lagged and choked.” Anna shrugged. “And this is the truth of any game - it can only exist at the moment that is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.”

What Sam loved best was being alone with Sadie and filling a blank slate with their grand ideas. He loved building a world with her.

No, Sam had said, you don’t understand. It’s the principle. She was pretending to be my friend, but she was just doing it for community service. Marx had looked at Sam blankly, and then he said, No one spends hundreds of hours doing anything out of charity, Sam. Thinking of this and looking at the little paperweight, Sam’s heart swelled with love for Sadie. Why was it so hard for him to say he loved her even when she said it to him? He knew he loved her. People who felt far less for each other said “love” all the time, and it didn’t mean a thing. And maybe that was the point. He more than loved Sadie Green. There needed to be another word for it.

There are, he determines, infinite ways his mother doesn’t die that night and only one way she does.

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

As Sadie spoke, Sam was reminded of a winter afternoon, many years ago, and of commuters clogging up the train station, blocking his path. At the time, they’d seemed like impediments to him, but maybe he’d been thinking of them the wrong way. What makes a person want to shiver in a train station for nothing more than the promise of a secret image? But then, what makes a person drive down an unmarked road in the middle of the night? Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans. Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from dispair.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

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We thought about the ceiling for days afterward, and as we talked to more of the crew, we realized a big part of our lives had been missing from our murals thus far - all the people for whom we had no photos, no proof of their existence except for lingering memories: a lost love, a crush, a coworker, the mailman, a neighbor who you said hello to but never really knew, a bartender who gave you free drinks once in a while for being a loyal customer, people who seemed so peripheral to one’s life yet so incredibly important in the absence of earth.

“A Gallery, A Century, A Cry A Millennium” in How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

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Sometimes it was as simple as a description of a meal that she knew Leonard himself liked to eat - fried eggs left alone in the pan long enough to turn brown and crispy at the edges - or the mention of the Kinks. They were all little parts of him, preserved forever, molecules they had rearranged themselves into words on a page, but Alice could see them for why they were, which was her father.

She thought about what Melinda had told her - everything mattered, but nothing was fixed. Melinda hadn’t been talking about time travel, Melinda had never talked about time travel, Alice thought, because Melinda was a sensible, grounded person, but it was good advice. All the tiny pieces added together to make a life, but the pieces could always be rearranged.

These two women were talking about these characters that her father had invented as if they were real, because they were. Sometimes people didn’t understand that - Alice wasn’t a writer, but she’d spent enough time sitting at dinner tables with novelists to understand that fiction was a myth. Fictional stories, that is. Maybe there were bad ones out there, but the good ones, the good ones - those were always true. Not the facts, not the rights and the lefts, not the plots, which could take place in outer space or in hell or anywhere in between, but the feelings. The feelings were the truth.

New York City didn’t stop, either. That was another banner that could hang across a city street - the number of places you loved that were gone and had been replaced by different versions of themselves, places that someone else would love and remember long after you were dead.

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

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But if a waking writer tells you that his tale is only a thing imagined in his sleep, he cheats deliberately the primal desire at the heart of Faerie: the realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder. It is often reported of fairies (truly or lyingly, I don’t know) that they are workers or illusion, that they are cheaters of men by ‘fantasy’; but that is quite another matter. That is their affair. Such trickeries happen, at any rate, inside tales in which the fairies are not themselves illusions; behind the fantasy real wills and powers exist, independent of the minds and purposes of men.

The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water.

Tolkien On Fairy-Stories

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Still, a part of him hesitated. He was a man of books and genteel service. Traveling the countryside to visit villages was enough removed from his experience to be discomforting. Infiltrating the Inquisitor stronghold…

Marsh obviously didn’t care about his companion’s inner struggles. The Inquisitor turned and began to walk along the rim of the crater.

“At first glance, the key and the lock it fits may seem very different,” Sazed said. “Different in shape, different in function, different in design. The man who looks at them without knowledge of their true nature might think them opposites, for one is meant to open, and the other to keep closed. Yet upon closer examination, he might see that without one, the other becomes useless. The wise man then knows that both lock and key were created for the same purpose.”

“What are you doing?” Vin demanded.

“Going with you,” Allrianne said.

…

“We don’t want you along,” Vin said. “We don’t trust you - and we don’t like you.”

Elend closed his eyes. Dear, blunt Vin.

The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson

[caromelon]

The right belief is like a good cloak, I think. If it fits you well, it keeps you warm and safe. The wrong fit, however, can suffocate.

If you want to be good at burning tin, she thought, translating as best she could, learn to deal with distraction. It isn’t about what you see — it’s about what you can ignore.

Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

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It is not always the majestic concerns of Imperial ministers which dictate the course of history, nor is it necessarily the pontification of priests which move the hands of God.

Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

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You can let yourself do that when you get old, go for a little stroll in your imagination.

They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

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It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.

Names reflect true understanding of a thing, and when you truly understand a thing you have power over it.

There was a tiny sob from the shadows that froze my heart solid and broke off a piece of it.

“It is an edge,” he said at last. “It is a high place with a chance of falling. Things are more easily seen from edges. Danger rouses the sleeping mind. It makes things clear. Seeing things is a part of being a namer.”

“What about falling?” I asked.

“If you fall, you fall,” Elodin shrugged. “Sometimes falling teaches us things too. In dreams you often fall before you wake.”

I took one, thanked him, and faded from his awareness for the rest of the evening. When I glanced back several minutes later, he was eating unabashedly from his pocket and bickering with his wife about whether or not the peasantry could make bread from acorns. From the sound of it, I guessed it was a small piece of a larger argument that they had been having their entire lives.

“There are so many men, all endlessly attempting to sweep me off my feet. And there is one of you, trying just the opposite. Making sure my feet are firm beneath me, lest I fall.”

“Not pointless,” I protested. “It’s the questions we can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers.” … “That way, when he finds the answers, they’ll be precious to him. The harder the question, the harder we hunt. The harder we hunt, the more we learn.”

“Would you call this beautiful?” She asked after we had looked a while.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Uncertainty. “Perhaps its movement.”

“The stone moved not at all, and you called it beautiful as well.” Questioning.

“It is not the nature of stone to move. Perhaps it is beauty to move according to your nature.”

Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss