Jen

“A boy at the beginning of a story has no way of knowing that the story has begun.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“Perhaps it was survival rather than victory, but sometimes just surviving was your definition of a win.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shards of Earth

“In her 1979 essay collection The Language of the Night, Ursula K. Le Guin paraphrases Tolkien: “If a soldier is captured by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?… If we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape and to take as many people with us as we can.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories

“What Alice needed most then was a nice long holiday, and then perhaps institutionalization at some remote facility near the sea.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis