Ashley

“She has always loved animals. She has always been mystified by them, pulling carriages, dragging a plow, the heedful dogs guarding the sheep on the hillsides, her striped cat stalking a rat behind the grain bin. They fascinate her for reasons she does not know, but she knows we owe them for their trust, the ones that have come to live with us.”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“MacFarland could imitate people; he used to make Simon laugh until he was paralytic. He told stories about his grandfather and the Shawnee wars and they were always somehow funny. It was different then. The air was different and the long remote crying of the steamboat whistles as they came down from the Monongahela and Pittsburgh seemed to tell a story of a great nation and a great people with adventure and the look of distance in their eyes, and now it was somehow soiled with the stench of the dead. MacFarland was dead. Lincoln was dead. Neighbors had shot one another dead. It was not the same country.”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome, possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.”
― J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“Worldbringers like myself spend decades combing through folk tales, legends, myths, histories, and drunken bar songs looking for the most unique stories. We hunt for bravery, cleverness, heroism. And we find no shortage of such virtues. Legends are silly with them. But the person who is willing to reconsider their assumptions? The hero who can sit down and reevaluate their life? Well, now that is a gemstone that truly glitters, friend.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea