Sam Higton

“I thought of one of these moments as I sat there waiting for the hawk to eat from my hand. It was a black-and-white photograph my father had taken many years ago of an elderly street-cleaner with a white goatee beard, wrinkled socks and down-at-heel shoes. Crumpled work trousers, work gloves, a woollen beret. The camera is low, on the pavement: Dad must have crouched in the road to take it. The man is bending down, his besom of birch twigs propped against his side. He has taken off one of his gloves, and between the thumb and first finger of his bare right hand he is offering a crumb of bread to a sparrow on the kerbstone. The sparrow is caught mid-hop at exactly the moment it takes the crumb from his fingers. And the expression on the man’s face is suffused with joy. He is wearing the face of an angel.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“We’re getting these people ready for a war, Sam. And not the fun kind of war that they make movies about. The bad kind of war. The kind they write poetry about,”
― Chris Farnell, Fermi's Progress 2. Descartesmageddon

“Magic was transgression, the blurring of the line between the impossible and the possible. There was something about crossing that boundary that seemed to shake loose all the morals and taboos people took for granted. When anything was within your grasp, it got harder and harder to remember why you shouldn’t take it—money, power, your dream job, your dream fuck, a life.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent

“The warm steam that had been filled with the pungent odors of roasting beef and pork had changed to the clammy damp of moss.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger