Well, here we are at the beginning of another year, trying this post again. I wonder how far into the year I’ll get this time before getting distracted from it.
Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.
Young would-be novelists and poets believe that art is eternal. Au contraire: we are in the business of ephemera, the era of floating islands of trash, and most of the things we feel deeply and inscribe on the page will disappear.
If every member of the human race evinced a fondness for literature and even a moderate level of dexterity with the written word, I would be a happier, if not more well-adjusted, man.
Skin Game by Jim Butcher
Home is where, when you go there and tell people to get out, they have to leave.
There’s power in the touch of another person’s hand. We acknowledge it in little ways, all the time. There’s a reason human beings shake hands, hold hands, slap hands, bump hands.
It comes from our very earliest memories, when we all come into the world blinded by light and color, deafened by riotous sound, flailing in a suddenly cavernous space without any way of orienting ourselves, shuddering with cold, emptied with hunger, and justifiably frightened and confused. And what changes that first horror, that original state of terror?
The touch of another person’s hands.
Hands that wrap us in warmth, that hold us close. Hands that guide us to shelter, to comfort, to food. Hands that hold and touch and reassure us through our very first crisis, and guide us into our very first shelter from pain. The first thing we ever learn is that the touch of someone else’s hand can ease pain and make things better.
That’s power. That’s power so fundamental that most people never even realize it exists.
Things are not always as bad as they seem. Sometimes, the darkness only makes it easier to see the light.
There are moments in your life that, when you look back at them, you realize were perfect. A hundred million things had to happen, to all come together at the same time, for such moments to come into existence — so many things that it beggars imagination to think that they could possibly have happened by random chance. This was one of them.
And since when had I become the guy that things happened to ten years ago?
She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan
Destroying what someone else cherished never brought back what you yourself had lost. All it did was spread grief like a contagion.
People said that a single day without a dear friend could feel like three autumns.
She observed him from inside the lean-to. He was one of those people who has eyes that look like eyes, and a nose like a nose. Nondescript.
Chen’s teeth gleamed like those of a predator that would devour you without even spitting out the bones.
The Governor was obviously the kind of person who received as much spiritual contentment from berating others as a cold man does from a bowl of soup.
She dismounted awkwardly and went over to Xu Da as he lifted the Prince of Radiance from his horse. Xu Da wore a ginger look that she understood perfectly. There was something about the child that provoked unease. It was like seeing someone’s knee bending the wrong way. Even now, despite everything that had happened inside and outside Bianliang, the Prince of Radiance still wore that same graceful smile.
Peace Talks by Jim Butcher
Home, like love, hate, war, and peace, is one of those words that is so important that it doesn’t need more than one syllable. Home is part of the fabric of who humans are. Doesn’t matter if you’re a vampire or a wizard or a secretary or a schoolteacher; you have to have a home, even ff only in principle—there has to be a zero point from which you can make comparisons to everything else. Home tends to be it.
That can be a good thing, to help you stay oriented in a very confusing world. If you don’t know where your feet are planted, you’ve got no way to know where you’re heading when you start taking steps. It can be a bad thing, when you run into something so different from home that it scares you and makes you angry. That’s also part of being human.
But there’s a deeper meaning to home. Something simpler, more primal.
It’s where you eat the best food because other predators can’t take i from you very easily there.
It’s where you and your mate are the most intimate.
It’s where you raise your children, safe against a world that can do horrible things to them.
It’s where you sleep, safe.
It’s where you relax.
It’s where you dream.
Home is where you embrace the present and plan the future.
It’s where the books are.
And more than anything else, it’s where you build that world that you want.
Battle Ground by Jim Butcher
War leaves you precious little time to be human. It’s one of the more horrible realities about it.
“What’s going to happen after this, do you think?”
“I don’t,” she said. “Because I’m doing today first.”
I snorted quietly.
Murphy squeezed back. “Harry. You can’t fix tomorrow until it gets here.”
“Which is weird, because you can screw it up from decades away.”
I’m not saying pain is what defines us as human beings. But it is, in many ways, what unites us. We all recognize other people in pain. Damned near all of us are moved to do something about it when we see it. It’s our common enemy, though it isn’t, really, an enemy. Pain is, at least when our bodies are working properly, a teacher. A really tough, really strict, and perfectly fair teacher.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.
Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.
The Law by Jim Butcher
Planet Earth isn’t a fair place. It’s unfair in a broad variety of different ways, some worse than others, but it isn’t fair. Not for anybody. And that’s pretty much the fairest thing about it.
My knuckles ached to meet his nose.
Everyone in the Group Chat Dies by L.M. Chilton
The moment I agreed to a dinner party, I knew my thirties had officially arrived, and the slow, inevitable countdown to death had begun.
Lit by Tim Sandlin
I’ve never seen a real battle- ax in person, but I know they are frequently compared to a woman’s demeanor and if I ever do come upon one in a museum or a camp where people are pretending to be Vikings, I would expect it to have an edge like Mimi’s chin.
I was all set to fall in love with a stranger obsessed with death. I’d been in love with a woman obsessed with Leonard Cohen, which is almost the same thing.
I considered correcting his word choices, but the kid seemed to be thinking. He was reading a book. Anyone who reads a book is better than anyone who doesn’t.
Here’s one of those truths you should get from books before some idiot burns them. If you are going to love someone, you need to take seriously what they take seriously. And vice versa. If your wife (or husband) thinks your strongest concerns are silly, or worse, stupid, you’re sunk. Get a dog.
Here’s the thing about loving. It’s an incredible risk. You give your every thought and desire to a person you hardly know and you are almost bound to lose. Even non- romantic love is dangerous, but romantic love, the kind based on mutual trust and feeling, is crapshoot roulette. It either kills you or wears you out. But then, a life without love is a waste. I’m not good at waste. It makes me antsy.
“I don’t see anyone committing murder over books.”
What kind of person would think so little of books? “Sunny, I am aghast you would say that. Books are sacred. To destroy one is a cardinal sin.”
Annotating a book on its pages is not a heck of a lot better than burning it.
Twelve Months by Jim Butcher
“You can’t pick a favorite,” I said. “They’re books. They’re pieces of someone’s mind and soul. They’re almost friends.” I started back down the stairs again. “Sometimes a poet speaks best to what’s happening to you. Sometimes it’s a philosopher. Sometimes it’s a storyteller.”
“We’re here to help,” he said.
Four words. None of them long.
The truly important words never are.
Gentleness is power that chooses to restrain itself. That is under control. Gentleness is someone strong who makes the choice to be careful with that strength.
“That merely indicates his stupidity,” spat Mother Winter.
“Stupidity,” Mab mused. “Courage. The only difference is the outcome!“
The Troubled Deep by Rob Parker
She shook her head. She was by now so jaded that cynicism was not just a way of dealing with things, but not it was a character quirk so embedded it had become a central psychological pillar.
The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee
We Americans like to put our culture into disposable containers. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way we treat our past. We discard villages, towns, even cities, when they grow old, and we are now in the process of discarding our recorded history, not in a shredder, but by rewriting it as romance. We are eager to watch docu-dramas on television; we prefer to read a history of the American Revolution as seen through the eyes of Mad Anthony Wayne’s last mistress. Now there is nothing wrong in reading historical fiction—perhaps two-thirds of the world’s classics are written in that form. But these are impatient days; more than ever it seems that we want anything but the real thing: we are afraid that the real thing might be dull, demanding, and worst of all, lacking in suspense.
(Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay)
