Charles Thomas

“Their former masters had wrought something beautiful in the midst of their ruthlessness: a beast that sang, a machine that expressed its thoughts in poems. Jax had wished he were capable of sleeping like a human, for it would have been wonderful to experience a lullaby from this magnificent cousin.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Time passed. Generations of men came and went, lived and died around the spring. The jarls became earls, then dukes. The Norsemen became Normen, then Britons. They fought Saxons; they fought Saracens; they fought the Kaiser. But the land outlived them all with elemental constancy.”
― Ian Tregillis, Bitter Seeds