Leah

“We are all stardust and stories.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“From what I’d written in “The Improper Princess” and from the history I’d given in Talking to Dragons, I already knew the general outline of her adventures, which, again, required someone smart, practical, and sure of herself. Explaining this occasionally confounds people who think that I wrote Cimorene as some sort of feminist statement about what women can achieve. I find their surprise hard to understand. My real-life family and friends are full of women like Cimorene, from my twin cousins, who have been fur trappers in the Alaskan bush for most of their lives, to my mother, who became an engineer long before women’s liberation officially opened “nontraditional careers” to women, to my grandmothers, aunts, and cousins, who were office managers, farmers, nurses, nuns, geologists, and bookkeepers, among other things. None of these women takes any guff from anyone. They aren’t proving a point about what women could, should, or can do; they are ignoring that whole question (which none of them considers a question worth asking at all) and getting on with doing the things that interest them most.”
― Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing with Dragons

“Cimorene tilted her head to one side, considering. "I think I'm glad you didn't win."

"Oh? Why is that?" Kazul sounded amused.

"Because you wouldn't have had any use for a princess if you were the Queen of the Dragons, and if you hadn't decided to take me on, that yellow-green dragon Moranz would probably have eaten me," Cimorene explained.

"You mean, if I were the King of the Dragons," Kazul corrected her. "Queen of the Dragons is a dull job."

"But you're a female!" Cimorene said. "If you'd carried Colin's Stone from the Ford of Whispering Snakes to the Vanishing Mountain, you'd have had to be a queen, wouldn't you?"

"No, of course not," Kazul said. "Queen of the Dragons is a totally different job from King, and it's not one I'm particularly interested in. Most people aren't. I think the position's been vacant since Oraun tore his wing and had to retire."

"But King Tokoz is a male dragon!" Cimorene said, then frowned. "Isn't he?"

"Yes, yes, but that has nothing to do with it," Kazul said a little testily.

"'King' is the name of the job. It doesn't matter who holds it."

Cimorene stopped and thought for a moment. "You mean that dragons don't care whether their king is male or female; the title is the same no matter who the ruler is."

"That's right. We like to keep things simple."

"Oh.”
― Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing with Dragons

“We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.”
― James Anthony Froude