Peter > Peter's Quotes

“You should know they don’t discourage drug use here. Let your provider know if you don’t want it around you, and they’ll do their best.” His surprise is genuine, and I try not to be insulted by it. “I thought this place was about wellness?” “It is. For some people, wellness is a little oblivion. If someone wants to use it to destroy themselves, better to figure out why they want to disappear than just make sure they never hold a blade again.” It’s a line straight out of Exlee’s mouth, but it’s one of my favorites. The House raised me, so I’m indifferent to drug use. Like anything else that doesn’t deliberately hurt others, it’s morally neutral here. Lots of people use with no harm done to themselves or others. Those that do harm themselves, well, I understand how strong the urge to self-destruct can be, no matter what form it takes. But I’ve seen it in people who lift or run until they’re nothing, people who love only those that hurt them, people who spend their pay so quick it’s like they want to starve—not just those who tap their veins looking for a way out. They all have the same thing in common: 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.”
― Micaiah Johnson, Those Beyond the Wall

“This is how we can peacefully coexist, the only way, when one entity doesn’t hold the existence of the other in its firm grasp.”
― Micaiah Johnson, Those Beyond the Wall

“Love is not a prize to be won or a sign of one’s merit. It is a gift freely given.”
― Rebecca Roanhorse, Mirrored Heavens

“The truth was, people were garbage at any age—but school was an institution, no different in principle than prisons, the military, mental hospitals, or other places where society warehoused entire classes of people.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster

“Cats, I have found, seem to exist in more or less the same form in every world; it is my belief that they have been slipping in and out of doors for several thousand years. Anyone familiar with house cats will know this is a particular hobby of theirs.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“Funny thing about those Middle Ages,” said Joseph. “They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they’re in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there’s an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can’t deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don’t you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.”
― Kage Baker, In the Garden of Iden: The First Company Novel

“Nothing made you feel so useless as another person's grief.”
― Laini Taylor, Days of Blood & Starlight

“Once again, I can provide ample scientific—” “Yes, I know. But understand that at least twenty percent of the people reporting to me, think wireless internet access is witchcraft.”
― Gene Doucette, Fixer Redux

“When I’m old and dying, wheezing my guts out, my organs failing, I want to walk out the front door of some old farmhouse on my own land, maybe forty, fifty hectares of it. I want to find a cool place in the woods under some old oak tree and settle down there and die as the sun comes up. I want a death rattle, a final breath, a body intact that can then be torn apart by scavengers, riddled with worms, my limbs dragged off to feed some family of little foxes, my guts teeming with maggots, until I am nothing but a gooey collection of juices that feeds the fungi and the oak seedlings and the wild grasses. I want my bleached bones scatted across my own land, broken and sucked clean of marrow, half buried in snow and finally, finally, covered over in loam and ground to dust by the passage of time, until I am broken into fragments, the pieces of my body returned to where they came. I could give back something to this world instead of taking, taking, taking. That’s the death I want.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“Who was she to whinge about cutting the corners off the truth so it could wedge into tight spaces?”
― Tracy Townsend, The Fall

“The recession of empathy they had to witness and endure (some, of course, in more acute or violent ways than others). The triple threat of heat and war and high water.”
― M. T. Hill, Zero Bomb

“Pigeons prefer dense urban settings, and they congregate in open spaces. It’s exactly the same environment favored by the mentally ill, drug addicts, and homeless people. I suspect that some of the disgust we feel for pigeons is associative. We’ve grafted our feelings about human outcasts onto these birds because they share the same spaces and hang around waiting for handouts. Perhaps we’d feel differently about pigeons if we were better at dealing with our own species.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“When you travel with money, you follow a smooth, well-worn path through the world.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“The iron law of bureaucracy dictates that most of the people in any large organization will, after a time, be more preoccupied with preserving their own jobs than with fulfilling the mission statement of the agency.”
― Charles Stross, Empire Games

“I could see what a voracious monster that town was. It pulled you in and kept you there until you either rose to the top or got used up and thrown in the gutter.”
― J.S. Kelley, Gutter Mage

“Violence weakens the spirit,’ Durral said.”
― Sebastien de Castell, Way of the Argosi

“Not all struggles are overcome – some can only be endured. The teysan tries to make themselves strong, believing that strength will keep them from breaking. A true Argosi embraces defeat, despair and disaster, knowing that to fall is inevitable, and the art we must learn is to rise up again.”
― Sebastien de Castell, Fall of the Argosi

“These are Meyer lemons,” Horace said as we passed the trees. “Named for Frank Nicholas Meyer. Dutch by birth, but an agent of the United States government. He worked for the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Seed and Plant Introduction before the First World War. I thought of him when Jaina Mitra spoke of her microbial survey. Meyer and his cohort were hunters for larger prey. They canvassed the world and sent back living samples of plants thought to be useful to the advancement of the American economy. Meyer worked in China. He sent the first soybean to America. And persimmons! Any persimmon grown in this country today comes from that lineage. And of course, there are these lemons—named for him. Meyer died in China. He drowned in the Yangtze, pushed from a riverboat.”
― Robin Sloan, Sourdough

“On both sides, they’ve failed us,” the fish said. “Of course, we know about the industrialists. Their corn syrup and cheese product. Their factory farms ringed by rivers of blood and shit, blazing bonfires of disease barely contained by antibiotic blankets. These are among the most disgusting scenes in the history of this planet.”
― Robin Sloan, Sourdough

“Falling to a low estate can do that—you see so much more of the world than you did before. You become very aware of how thin the line is, of how little safety exists.”
― Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

“Paranoia and security are only ever a thin line apart.”
― Kate Griffin, The Minority Council

“Lone hero sounds great in the ad, not so good in the picture.”
― Kate Griffin, The Minority Council

“There was something, Rhys concluded, in the sound of rising steam that lent itself to calm. Essentially, water was being excited to dangerous temperatures; so this calm had to be a cultural thing, born out of four hundred years of the British drinking tea. But it was hard to imagine that anyone could get really fraught when there was a cup of tea in the offing.”
― Kate Griffin, The Glass God

“Your God’s plan and my current situation aren’t really seeing eye to eye.”
― Mike Carlozzi, Mystics of Fortune

“And, as everybody knows, peace is the one cause so just and noble that no amount of violence is too great a price to bring it about.”
― Sebastien de Castell, Fate of the Argosi

“That was him donning his armour, only his armour wasn’t made out of metal but from the love he shared with Enna. Stronger than steel, impenetrable to despair.”
― Sebastien de Castell, Fate of the Argosi

“Wisdom is never free, and the price is paid in either years or in pain.”
― Sebastien de Castell, Fate of the Argosi

“Maybe 99.99% of our lives will be spent stuck trudging down the narrow sidewalks afforded to us by capitalism. Roads have taken away our land, our right to roam and play. Artificial scarcity forces us to work ourselves sick at shitty, soul-crushing jobs or we risk death from starvation, homelessness, or medical neglect. Environmental destruction has severed us from our nurturing nonhuman relatives. Colonization has erased our ancestors and histories. Step out of line, raise your voice against the state, make a mistake, and you’ll be crushed with swift and brutal violence. But once in a while, for a brief bubble in time, enough of us get together to defy the ruling classes. To step out in the street and carve our own path. And even if I get to experience that for less than 0.01% of my time on this earth, I’ll take it.”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

“All of us steal our lives. A little here, a little there. Some of it given, most of it taken. We wear ourselves like a coat of many patches, fraying at the edges, in constant repair. While we shore up one belief, we let go another. We are the stories we tell to ourselves. Nothing more.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn