Maggie

“Forgive before they do, and nothing can get to you.”
― Matthew Edward Hall

“We are confronted by an interesting phenomenon: a literary hero losing gradually contact with the book that bore him; leaving his fatherland, leaving his creator’s desk and roaming space after roaming Spain. In result, Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes’s womb. He has ridden for three hundred and fifty years through the jungles and tundras of human thought—and he has gained in vitality and stature. We do not laugh at him any longer. His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become a paragon.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote

“Look who it is,” he croons, though it takes effort to get past the gravel in his voice. “The little thief herself.”
― Rachel Schneider, Metal Slinger

“There, surrounding me, were volumes and volumes of words that black-hearted men had scratched down, silencing woman after woman. I thought of the city, filled with smoke and screaming; I thought of my grandmother, adding pine branches to the pyre so the smoke might kill the women before the flames; I thought of the laws and the hunts that this man – fingers linked across his belly, his portrait shining behind him – would bring back if he could.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights