Tress of the Emerald Sea

by Brandon Sanderson

There was a hunger to such men that was best avoided.

Here the mansion squatted like a corpulent frog atop its lily.

Charlie was like a good set of gloves. The longer she spent with him, the more right their time together felt.

It was delivered by Hoid the cabin boy. (Yes, that’s me. What tipped you off? Was it perhaps the name?)

She felt less like a mere human being, and more like a human who was merely being.

“It is. But a terrible idea executed brilliantly has to be better than a brilliant idea executed terribly.

After she went upstairs, Lem retrieved his cane, put on his coat, and went out to do some advanced fathering.

Gulls dived at the vines and attacked them with apparent gusto. What was that about?

The pirates still appeared reluctant. Why would they care about her? But their hesitance was an opportunity.

That “wizard” from the stars wasn’t me, by the way. I’ve always wondered who traded the device to Fort. That’s Nalthian tech, with Awakened predictive Connection circuits.

She took my other sense of taste. The important one. And with it went my sense of humor, my sense of decorum, my sense of purpose, and my sense of self.

If you wish to become a storyteller, here is a hint: sell your labor, but not your mind. Give me ten hours a day scrubbing a deck, and oh the stories I could imagine. Give me ten hours adding sums, and all you’ll have me imagining at the end is a warm bed and a thought-free evening.

“This alone is dangerous, but your varieties are also highly unstable. The tiniest hint of a catalyst—water, in this case—and they pull Investiture directly from the Spiritual Realm to explosively germinate. It’s a remarkable process.”

“I can’t,” he said softly. “I can’t ever go back to my island, Tress. Because my home isn’t there anymore.”

there are, unquestionably, musical geniuses of incomparable talent who died as street sweepers because they never had the chance to pick up an instrument.

Painful or passionate, surreal or sublime, we cherish those little rocks of peak experience, polishing them with the ever-smoothing touch of recycled proxy living.

Purpose is so integral to us that we see it everywhere.

The rain danced around in circles in the distance, then vanished. A capricious god taunting us? A natural process, given autonomy only by our brains as they searched for patterns, meaning, and volition?

I know what I believed that day.

Trouble was, her mind didn’t seem to work right anymore. Where it had once seized upon ideas with a predatory vigor, now it seemed trapped in a room, scratching uselessly at the walls with nothing to show for the effort.

If I didn’t practice narrative triage, you’d be here all week listening to how a Doug once got so drunk, she ended up as queen.

The imprecision of our language is a feature; it best represents the superlative fact of human existence: that our own emotions—even our souls—are themselves imprecise.

It was a tense, dramatic moment—that unfortunately the terrible monsters forgot to attend.

And standing there on the summit of her mountain, Ann wondered at how tiny it suddenly seemed.

The ocean, however, was now as you hopefully imagine it. Assuming you imagine it as emerald green, made up of spores, and bearing endless possibilities.