Taylor > Taylor's Quotes

“She knows that history digs a shallow grave, and that the past is always waiting to rise again.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“It's a risk just to be a woman, in my experience. No matter how healthy or hardworking she is.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“Fairy tales are more than moral lessons and time capsules for cultural commentary; they are natural law. The child raised on folklore will quickly learn the rules of crossroads and lakes, mirrors and mushroom rings. They’ll never eat or drink of a strange harvest or insult an old woman or fritter away their name as though there’s no power in it. They’ll never underestimate the youngest son or touch anyone’s hairpin or rosebush or bed without asking, and their steps through the woods will be light and unpresumptuous. Little ones who seek out fairy tales are taught to be shrewd and courteous citizens of the seen world, just in case the unseen one ever bleeds over.”
― S.T. Gibson

“You did not let me keep my name, so I will strip you of yours. In this world you are what I say you are, and I say you are a ghost, a long night's fever dream that I have finally woken up from. I say you are the smoke-wisp memory of a flame, thawing ice suffering under an early spring sun, a chalk ledger of depts being wiped clean. I say you do not have a name.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“War is the whetstone that grinds down all sense, all humanity.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I made you into my private Christ, supplicated with my own dark devotions. Nothing existed beyond the range of your exacting gaze, not even me. I was simply a non-entity when you weren't looking at me, an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the sweet water of your attention.
A woman can't live like that, my Lord. No one can. Don't ask me why I did it.
God, forgive me.
Christ, forgive me.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. I suppose both are a sort of gentle violence, putting down in ink what scorches the air when spoken aloud.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I will render you as you really were, neither cast in pristine stained glass or unholy fire. I will make you into nothing more than a man, tender and brutal in equal measure, and perhaps in doing so I will justify myself to you. To my own haunted conscience.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I lost myself so entirely in charting the contours of my love for you that there wasn't any room for tracking time. There wasn't any room to examine the past or the future, there was only the eternal now.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I know you loved us all, in your own way. Magdalena for her brilliance, Alexi for his loveliness. But I was your war bride, your faithful Constanta, and you loved me for my will to survive. You coaxed that tenacity out of me and broke it down in your hands, leaving me on your work table like a desiccated doll until you were ready to repair me. You filled me with your loving guidance, stitched up my seams with thread in your favorite color, taught me how to walk and talk and smile in whatever way pleased you best. I was so happy to be your marionette, at first. So happy to be chosen.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I have one final promise to make to you, one I hope I will never break. I promise to live, richly and shamelessly and with my arms wide open to the world. If there was any part left of you at the end that wished our our great happiness, that truly wanted what was best for us, I think it would be pleased to hear me say it. I do not know if I have justified my choice to you, but I think I have justified it to myself, and that has brought me peace enough.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“If you can still hear me wherever you are, my love, my tormentor, hear this: It was never my intention to murder you. Not in the beginning, anyway.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I dove down deep into your psyche, turning over every word you gave me like a jewel. Looking for meaning, seeking out the mysteries of you. I didn't care if I lost myself in the process. I wanted to be brought by the hand into your world and disappear into your kiss until us two could no longer be told apart.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“You never once thought I would have the strength to disobey you, did you? The possibility that my will was stronger than yours never even crossed your mind.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“The truth is, Rosemary, that you are capable of anything. Good or bad. You always have been, and you always will be. Given the right push, you, too, could do horrible things. That darkness exists within all of us. You think every soldier who picked up a cutter gun was a bad person? No. She was just doing what the soldier next to her was doing, who was doing what the soldier next to her was doing, and so on and so on. And I bet most of them — not all, but most — who made it through the war spent a long time after trying to understand what they’d done. Wondering how they ever could have done it in the first place. Wondering when killing became so comfortable.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“We cannot blame ourselves for the wars our parents start. Sometimes the very best thing we can do is walk away.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“That’s not the same. What happened to you, to your species, it’s . . . it doesn’t even compare.’ ‘Why? Because it’s worse?’ She nodded. ‘But it still compares. If you have a fractured bone, and I’ve broken every bone in my body, does that make your fracture go away? Does it hurt you any less, knowing that I am in more pain?”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“Humans’ preoccupation with ‘being happy’ was something he had never been able to figure out. No sapient could sustain happiness all of the time, just as no one could live permanently within anger, or boredom, or grief.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“Such a quintessentially Human thing, to express sorrow through apology.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“He did not run from his grief, nor did he deny its existence. He could study his grief from a distance, like a scientist observing animals. He embraced it, accepted it, acknowledged that it would never go away. It was as much a part of him as any pleasant feeling. Perhaps even more so.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“Sam's doctor said to him, "The good news is that the pain is in your head."
But I am in my head, Sam thought.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it is violent? Can you love it even when it does not love me?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“It's understandable why humans stopped living in space in the 2020s. How can you think of the stars when the seas are spilling over? How can you spare thought for alien ecosystems when your cities are too hot to inhabit? How can you trade fuel and metal and ideas when the lines on every map are in flux? How can anyone be expected to care about the questions of worlds above when the questions of the world you're stuck on — the most vital criteria of home and health and safety — remain unanswered?”
― Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“If I ask what I'm asking only of people who agree with me at the outset, with whom I already share a dream and a language, then there's no point in asking at all.”
― Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“There are few better ways to get to know how a species thinks than to learn their art.”
― Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit

“We’re all just trying to be comfortable, and well fed, and unafraid.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“The amount a person can spare is relative; the value of generosity is not.”
― Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“All of you do this. Every organic sapient I’ve ever talked to, every book I’ve read, every piece of art I’ve studied. You are all desperate for purpose, even though you don’t have one. You’re animals, and animals don’t have a purpose. Animals just are. And there are a lot of intelligent – sentient, maybe – animals out there who don’t have a problem with that. They just go on breathing and mating and eating each other without a second thought. But the animals like you – the ones who make tools and build cities and itch to explore, you all share a need for purpose. For reason. That thinking worked well for you, once. When you climbed down out of the trees, up out of the ocean – knowing what things were for was what kept you alive. Fruit is for eating. Fire is for warmth. Water is for drinking. And then you made tools, which were for certain kinds of fruit, for making fire, cleaning water. Everything was for something, so obviously, you had to be for something too, right? All of your histories are the same, in essence. They’re all stories of animals warring and clashing because you can’t agree on what you’re for, or why you exist.”
― Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit

“With no need for a beginning, nor any reason to end, the music continues. And so, no matter who you are, where you came from, what sins you have committed or hurt you have endured... when you are alone and there is no universe left to remember you.
You can always, always rewrite your song”
― Ryka Aoki, Light from Uncommon Stars

“The secret to a beautiful death is living a beautiful life.”
― Mikki Brammer, The Collected Regrets of Clover