Spinch

“You’ve got to stop waiting to be told you’re allowed to do things,” Amity said. She didn’t look at her, kept loping along as casual as a fed coyote. “You’ve got to promise me you’ll stop being too scared to piss without permission.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“For a moment it felt as if everything around me stopped completely. Even the wind held its breath. Until that instant I had never truly understood despair, though I had lived with it my whole life. I thought despair was something you fought and died fighting – something you had to clothe yourself in madness and rage to protect against. But then, against all logic and decency, Brasti had decided, in that impossible moment, to turn all the pain in the world into a joke. You and I will grow old together and laugh at the day these silly birds came to rest in our fields, she had said to me. Hollow words, and yet their very emptiness left a hole that demanded to be filled. The sound that broke through my lips was harsh and awkward, like a man who’d forgotten how to speak, but it set Brasti off and he started laughing like a fool.”
― Sebastien de Castell, Traitor's Blade

“Our nation is weakened by a system that breeds a visceral hatred so deep that most people would as soon see the world burn as stay as it is, but lack the will to try and change it.”
― Sebastien de Castell, Traitor's Blade

“What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties—I daresay it would even give a merry toot—and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.”
― Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail