Céline

“Hope, though; now there’s a real pest. Hope doesn’t just nibble your cheese and chew holes in your skirting boards. Hope keeps you plodding on when it really is time to call it quits. Hope drags you to sixteen auditions in a single day, when there’s a nice job in your brother-in-law’s tannery just waiting for you. Hope keeps you going in Old Stairs or Paradise, even though there’s no money and nothing to eat and the landlord just took your chair and your chamber pot. Personally, I can see no great merit in simply being alive if you’re miserable and in pain, but Hope won’t let you go. She’s a tease, like bad children teasing a dumb animal, and I’ve made a point of avoiding her whenever I can. Still, sometimes she runs you down and there’s nowhere left for you to go. You can turn and fight her and lose, or let her scoop you up and turn your brain to mush.

Hope against hope. We had human chains shifting those blocks with levers and rollers, through the narrow alleys where carts couldn’t go. We had shifts digging the ditch by lamplight, in the rain. And in every working party there was at least one man who cheerfully announced that it wasn’t going to work, the whole idea was stupid, the enemy’ll find a way round this in two shakes, just you see; and even he didn’t really believe it, because of Hope. Hope turns a hundred men and women ripping the skin off their hands on a coarse hemp rope into a street party. Someone tells a joke, or clowns around, or starts singing a favourite song from one of the shows, and Hope bursts through, like sappers, and next thing you know she’s everywhere, like smoke, or floodwater, or rats. We’re going to beat Ogus, she whispers in every ear, and this time it’ll be different.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“There was jealous admiration: of beggars for commoners, of commoners for gentry, of gentry for nobility, of nobility for royalty, all twisting their necks looking always up to what they didn’t quite have. There was warlike enthusiasm, mostly from those who’d never drawn a sword in their lives, since those used to swinging them tend to know better. There was patriotic fervour enough to drown an island full of foreign scum, and righteous delight that the Union made the best young bastards in the world. There was civic pride from the denizens of mighty Adua, City of White Towers, for no one breathed vapours so thick or drank water as dirty as they did, nor paid so much for rooms so small.”
― Joe Abercrombie, A Little Hatred

“And it’s what’s true now that matters, sure as eggs is eggs. Think about it logically. Unless you’re a bit wrong in the head, you can remember what happened one minute ago clear as day. But you’ll be forgiven for being a bit hazy about the details of something you did or said twenty years ago. So, if there’s a discrepancy, the minute-old truth is far more likely to be correct than an inconsistent version dating back twenty years.

Twenty years ago – longer than that – I was Notker. Right now I’m Lysimachus, and this time tomorrow I’ll be Lysimachus II. And I have the scars to prove it.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“I’m Ylfing. I care about people, and I’ve been afraid because caring got me hurt, made me miss things that were right in front of me. Easier to just draw away, easier to run from it. But I care. I care and care and care, whether or not the person I care for deserves it. Everyone deserves understanding, at the very least. My greatest strength has always been in looking at someone and finding an inherent spark of goodness in them. This is not to redeem them. Some people are beyond redemption. But even they yearn to be understood, just as everyone does, just as I do. So I look into their hearts and find the jewel among the slop. Except the slop too has value and weight and importance. It completes a person. People soften when they’re around me. At least, they used to when I was young and small and cute. Perhaps they still do—I’ll have to watch for it. I never did anything in particular to merit that softening, besides being soft myself, and kind, and loving. I just reached out to them with my heart and made a connection.

And maybe that’s the key to all of it. Connections.”
― Alexandra Rowland