Abby

“Mother Tibbs made but an indifferent housemaid, for she spent most of her time at the garden gate, waving her handkerchief to the passers-by. And if, when at her work, she heard the sound of a fiddle or flute, however distant, she would instantly stop whatever she was doing and start dancing, brandishing wildly in the air broom, or warming-pan, or whatever domestic implement she may have been holding in her hands at the time.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“The gods of Winterfell kept a different sort of wood. It was a dark, primal place, three acres of old forest untouched for ten thousand years as the gloomy castle rose around it. It smelled of moist earth and decay. No redwoods grew here. This was a wood of stubborn sentinel trees armored in grey-green needles, of mighty oaks, of ironwoods as old as the realm itself. Here thick black trunks crowded close together while twisted branches wove a dense canopy overhead and misshapen roots wrestled beneath the soil. This was a place of deep silence and brooding shadows, and the gods who lived here had no names.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“But that’s like seeing a picture of a tree, and then actually climbing up in the tree with the branches going every way, the rustle of leaves and the smell and the bark under your fingers scraping and the wind going, and a thousand trees all round your tree, none of them being special and dramatic, just trees, and your tree was also just a tree being a tree, and the picture you’d looked at might be perfectly nice as its own flat thing, interesting and pretty and well composed, but it didn’t have much to do with the reality of the tree.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“It was exactly what I wanted, only once I was in it, I didn’t want it after all.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves