Annie

“We thought ourselves kings of the ages. Now we find that our civilization has been nothing but a brief, brightly lit nursery, where we have played with paper crowns and wooden scepters. Beyond the door are the dark wastes where Leviathans wrestled for millennia. We are a blink of an eye, a joke amidst a tragedy.”
― Frances Hardinge, The Lie Tree

“It is not written that great men shall be happy men. It is nowhere recorded that the rewards of public office include a quiet mind. He sits in Whitehall, the year folding around him, aware of the shadow of his hand as it moves across the paper, his own inconcealable fist; and in the quiet of the house, he can hear the soft whispering of his quill, as if his writing is talking back to him. Can you make a new England? You can write a new story. You can write new texts and destroy the old ones, set the torn leaves of Duns Scotus sailing about the quadrangles, and place the gospels in every church. You can write on England, but what was written before keeps showing through, inscribed on the rocks and carried on floodwater, surfacing from deep cold wells. It’s not just the saints and martyrs who claim the country, it’s those who came before them: the dwarves dug into ditches, the sprites who sing in the breeze, the demons bricked into culverts and buried under bridges; the bones under your floor. You cannot tax them or count them. They have lasted ten thousand years and ten thousand before that. They are not easily dispossessed by farmers with fresh leases and law clerks who adduce proof of title. They bubble out of the ground, wear away the shoreline, sow weeds among the crops and erode the workings of mines.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light

“Aasha readied herself. In the other rooms, she heard her sisters squabbling over lost cosmetics and borrowed outfits, arguing over the philosophical merits of one poem compared to another. Their love and gentle fights had been the music of her life for so long. But beyond the tent, a different song called out to her.”
― Roshani Chokshi, A Crown of Wishes

“Nirrim could have wondered about the truth of what she had lost for every moment of her little life, but she could not have named it, for it was compassion, and it remains the fate of all humans who lack compassion never to understand that they lack it.”
― Marie Rutkoski, The Hollow Heart