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She was, as my mother would say, “a woman of a certain age.” In this case, that age was about sixty.
Gallacian. I am told it is worse than Finnish, which is impressive. Every time we lost a fight, we made off with a few more loan words from our enemies. The upshot of all of this is that the Gallacian language is intensely idiosyncratic. (We have seven sets of pronouns, for example, one of which is for inanimate objects and one of which is used only for God. It’s probably a miracle that we don’t have one just for mushrooms.)
It is a cliché to say that a building’s windows look like eyes because humans will find faces in anything and of course the windows would be the eyes.
(Look, if you don’t make a fool of yourself over animals, at least in private, you aren’t to be trusted. That was one of my father’s maxims, and it’s never failed me yet.)
Denton likely thought that a sworn soldier would be a seven-foot-tall Amazon with one breast cut off and a harem of cowed men under kan heel. He was likely not expecting a short, stout person in a dusty greatcoat and a military haircut. I no longer bother to bind my breasts, but I never had a great deal to worry about in that direction,
the famous “I am not a woman, I am a soldier!” speech that you’ve probably read about even if you know nothing else about Gallacian history.
Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American.
Horses don’t understand a lot about the world, but I have found that they sometimes understand particular humans terrifyingly well. Mules understand a lot more about the world, but less about humans—or possibly they just don’t care what humans think. I’d buy either explanation, really.
It’s less galling to be mistaken for a man than a woman, for some reason. Probably because no one tries to kiss your hand or bar you from the Royal Mycology Society.
it did move, but not like any four-legged animal I’d ever seen. It put out one front foot and seemed to drag itself forward, then the other. Then one hind foot, catching up, then the other. It looked like a man scaling a sheer cliff, but on level ground.
(I thought of telling him about my encounter with the hare, but what could I say? It looked at me funny? The way it moved was rather horrible?)
People get hung up on happiness and joy, but fun will take you at least as far and it’s generally cheaper to obtain.
Livrit is a Gallacian specialty, which means it’s uniquely terrible. It strongly resembles vodka, although vodka would be ashamed to acknowledge the connection, sweetened, as livrit is, with the cloudberries that grow in the mountains. That might actually be palatable, though, and we can’t have that, so lichen is also included. The resulting drink starts syrupy, ends bitter, and burns all the way down.
He had always been jumpy. Nothing wrong with that. Jumpy means you survive. It also means you wear yourself out faster
Headache is always preferable to heartache, and if you’re focusing on not throwing up, you aren’t thinking about how the friends of your youth are dying around you.
One of the few things I learned from the Brits who served with me was that if you’re feeling dreadful, it helps to dress well.
Madeline had said that the tarn meant no harm. Probably neither did rabies. We could not risk humanity on the continued goodwill of an infant monster that could puppet the dead.
fictional aunt of Beatrix Potter (who was herself a noted mycologist).
