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September 4 - September 21, 2024
Bitterness is anger with nowhere to go. Bitterness and resignation are close and tempting cousins. Anger with a target is Rage, and Rage is sister to Hope alone. We rage because we do believe things can be better, by fire if necessary.
Science fiction is fueled by dreams of a different, but possible, future. The same is true for Rage.
I remind myself that wanting to shift someone else’s boundaries is a burden and a threat, not a gift or a compliment.
The emperor is like one of the reptiles outside of town—the ones whose names start with useless information like red-eyed or striped yellow belly but end with dragon or monster, which is what you actually need to know.
It didn’t matter which version was true. They were all real. Stories should never be believed, but they should always be trusted.
As long as someone is stretching to reach you, you’d better bend to reach them.
A good leader doesn’t know everything. What a good leader knows is how to trust those who do. Learn to use your resources,
The city wants its parks to show it cares about nature. But it killed an ecosystem when it was built, and endangers another by casting its constant light and unnatural shadow across a once untamed desert.
Names—real names, fixed names, government names—are too concrete to be made into a story properly. You say, A man named Diamond Jones died trying to eat a mountain and that’s why there’s a crater in the wastes. And someone says, Actually, I checked, and there’s never been a man named Diamond Jones or According to his obituary Diamond Jones died from cancer, not mountain-eating. But if you say, Once—once and only once, because dates are as bad as names for stories—a man loved the ground so much he ate a mountain and it killed him but it killed the mountain too, people will learn from the story
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Being in love with someone doesn’t entitle you to them; wanting someone doesn’t obligate them to want you back.
Cara looks at him like he’s just asked her to fuck a cactus.
hope somewhere in the last decade you’ve overcome the instinct to punish the thing you love just because you aren’t allowed to have it.”
I looked down at the featureless mass that used to look like people but now just looked like love.
Stop making permanent decisions off temporary emotions.
I wonder if she knows how special she is. How many people would use no one else is doing it as an excuse not to act, rather than as motivation.
“Don’t you just hate it? When you think you’re reading a story about science, and it turns out it’s been a story about magic all along?”
You can’t solve any craving for excess by stopping the act. You’ve got to solve what made them need, which is a separate thing entirely. Need can make any act harmful. Even love.
Spite can look just like care, if you squint.
They’ll slather themselves in his failure and pretend it’s their own success.
You are the most beautiful creature I have ever seen. You are perfect. If I could have made you love me back, I would have been able to love myself forever.
inhale deeply, deep enough to embed the smell of him into my lungs like a cancer that I hope kills me, or at least is still with me on the day that I die.
Having all those possibilities close off all at once is like seeing a cluster of stars wink out: It may not materially change anything, but I’ll always know my world is darker now than it could have been.
“It feels good to criticize others into the ground when we are right and we know they are wrong. But it’s not good, it’s righteous, and the two seldom have anything to do with each other.”
Cross looks at me like an expected ghost, the horror he knew was coming.
That’s all growth is, getting too big to stay somewhere that used to feel good. Just having one less place in the whole world that fits right.
Flattery will get you…pretty far with me, actually.
Maybe that’s all holiness is: the dirt that raised you in the hands of someone who cares.
