It’s important, Ellie, that they feel we’re a very benevolent dictatorship. It means we can get away with more.

The final book of the Fallen Gods trilogy by Hannah Kaner.

She came to us as any apocalypse does: slowly at first, and then all at once.

It occurred to him that a spell to make one’s enemies into idiots via the power of breasts might be immensely helpful. Then again, it might not be a spell. It might have only been the breasts.

“Pain isn’t a competition,” I assure him. “There’s always enough to go around.”

And what was a home but somewhere you wouldn’t have to feel quite so alone.

ts voice was like the wind, but also like a thousand trees thinking the same thought.

A person could work and work and work, and still never “earn” their dues. Sometimes success meant determination… and sometimes, it was just luck.

Perhaps being too powerful, too unopposed, is a curse in and of itself, leading to boredom and dissipation, and the invention of imaginary enemies whose powers to torment were less limited than those of flesh and blood.

Monsters and flowers aren’t much different. Sometimes they are hard to tell apart—but a good florist knows what to look for.

There are countless things she would rather be doing. On a night like this, when the blue moon is full and bursting with light like summer fruit, she wants nothing more than to bathe in the moon water that now floods the riverbanks. She wants to sing poorly with no judgment, wearing nothing but the night sky.

Animals began telling stories of Silver Nose’s nightly journeys and his signal fires. It did not take long for others to start calling him Flame Fox. A being who was black as night during the day and who set fires on fells as the rest of the world was fast asleep.

Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that came down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures. And of these histories most fair still in the ears of the Elves is the tale of Beren and Lúthien.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

Never trust a writer who doesn’t have too many books to read. Or a reader, for that matter.

Live long enough, you realize some folks can be handed a problem and some tools, and they’ll sort it out. And I never think twice about hiring that sort of fellow.

The city in the south would go the way of limestone, crumbling into the desert until nothing was left but an archaeological layer of dark gray ash and sorrow.

Fear is generous and does not exclusively live in the hearts of mortals.

No woman should be made to fear that she was not enough.

The unsaid thing about funerals is that directly after the communal mourning for someone you love, after everyone is gone and the connected grief dispersed, comes a solitude beyond imagining. A great, gaping nothing where a whole person and life and future used to be. The other side of a funeral is abyss.