Chad

“He turned reluctantly, driven away by the cold, but still listening until he passed into noisy spring again and found his way back home. He took the silence with him, though; he heard it in his dreams, where a part of him waited patiently for the ancient dreamers to speak a word as old and slow as stone.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Od Magic

“master of alternatives, the eternal custodian of Plan B;”
― K.J. Parker, Memory

“The West, one could pithily summarise, is bright; it not only brings with it the illumination of the Enlightenment, but also lights up every street, every town, every room with dazzling lamps, so that every single object will for evermore be sharp and delineated. The East, conversely, prefers to allow things to emerge only vaguely from the background, to hold their mutability and fragmentariness as their defining qualities, so that it would be considered the peak of aesthetic experience to catch only a glimmer of an object. How vulgar the clearly visible object that pretends it could exist independently of its context; how glorious the twilight that strips away the substance of things, their unanswerable persuasive power, their obvious worldliness.”
― Marion Poschmann, The Pine Islands

“It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation