Peony

“But Crispin had had three souls in Jad's creation to live with and love, and all three were gone. Was the knowledge of other losses to assuage his own? Sometimes, half asleep at night in the house, a wine flask empty by his bed, he would lie in the dark and think he heard breathing, a voice, one of the girls crying aloud in her dreams in the next room.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium

“Alara stared at the wet, red, wrinkled mite, revolted, and wondering why on earth she had bothered to save the child. Fire and Rain! The creature wasn’t even finished yet! She should just leave it here to die with its mother; it would be better that way. She didn’t even know exactly what to do with it—she’d probably kill it by accident. What an awful little beast—Then the little creature opened its tiny mouth—and a thin, unhappy wail rose above the desert silence. That wail cut straight to Alara’s maternal heart, as sure as elf-shot, and as deadly … and she knew she couldn’t leave it here. Not after all this. It was only a baby.”
― Mercedes Lackey, The Elvenbane

“Decisive works of art participate directly in the fabric of history surrounding their maker.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“After all, the world does (in large measure) reward authentic work. The problem is not absolute, but temporal: by the time your reward arrives, you may no longer be around to collect it....at any given moment, the world offers vastly more support to work it already understands — namely, art that’s already been around for a generation or a century. Expressions of truly new ideas often fail to qualify as even bad art — they’re simply viewed as no art at all.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear