Shannon

“ 'In our inmost and secret heart, which you ask us to bare to you, we wish to banish them as we were banished, to a cold and lonely house, in the charge of a man who hated us. And we wish them trapped there as we were trapped.'

'You consider that unjust, Serenity?'

'We consider it cruel,' Maia said. 'And we do not think that cruelty is ever just.' ”
― Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor

“But that is enough of such worrying. The river is waiting, and our hearts must be light, so we can faster travel.”
― Tad Williams, The Dragonbone Chair

“Entropy was the house that always won in the end. Everything we humans had ever built, from a stone axe to a spaceship, was just borrowing from a universe that would always claim it back with interest. A whole civilization -- art, mind and tech -- was founded in the shadow of that truth.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“Old texts say many things. You say these things as though they are special-- as if it is unusual for one person to see another in pain, and wish to help. As if, he says quietly, to do the extraordinary --or what you think is extraordinary-- a person must be told to do so, by the Divine.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs