Daria

“He planted his feet a shoulders width apart in the ground. After a moment he closed his eyes. Here was the wood. Slow and green he felt the life of it, the life that had been his life as well these four centuries past. It poured around him thick and steady, binding all together: the long patient strength of the trees that anchored, the deep bright power of the handful of dryads--Tobias felt Bramble clear as day among them, young and strong--and then the small and necessary, the bracken and ferns, the mosses and mushrooms. Here were the songbirds and ravens and solemn wide-winged owls, shy deer and burrowing rabbits, fox and badger and snake, beetles and moths and midges, all the things that were in the wood, that lived each in their own way under the shelter of the old oak.”
― Emily Tesh, Silver in the Wood

“Ask me how I am and I’ll scream,” she said. “How are you,” said Camilla, who was a pill. “I see you calling my bluff and I resent it,” said Gideon.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“It’s hard to accept that you’re the villain of someone else’s story.”
― Kate Davies, In at the Deep End

“The man who'd put the sword to her neck was uncomfortably buff. He had upsetting biceps. He didn't look healthy; he looked like a collection of lemons in a sack.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth