Sadia Choudhry

“It’s fine, Mom, really.”
She’s tucking me into my bed, asking me how my back feels for the one hundredth time in the ten minutes that I’ve been home. She smiles and strokes my hair. That’s what I’m going to miss the most about her. The way she strokes my hair and looks at me with so much love in her eyes.”
― Colleen Hoover, Slammed

“Which was why he reflexively turned when a flash of iridescence caught his eye. His first thought was: Morpho rhetenor Helena. The extraordinary tropical butterfly with wings of shifting colors: blues, lavenders, greens.
It proved to be a woman’s skirt.
The color was blue, but by the light of the legion of overhead candles, he saw purples and even greens shivering in its weave. A bracelet of pale stones winked around one wrist, a circlet banded her dark head. The chandelier struck little beams from that, too.
She’s altogether too shiny for a woman, he decided, and began to turn away.
Which was when she tipped her face up into the light.
Everything stopped. The beat of his heart, the pump of his lungs, the march of time.
Seconds later, thankfully, it all resumed. Much more violently than previously.
And then absurd notions roman-candled in his mind.
His palms ached to cradle her face—it was a kitten’s face, broad and fair at the brow, stubborn at the chin. She had kitten’s eyes, too: large and a bit tilted and surely they weren’t actually the azure of calm southern seas? Surely he, Miles Redmond, hadn’t entertained such a florid thought? Her eyebrows were wicked: fine, slanted, very dark. Her hair was probably brown, but it was as though he’d never learned the word “brown.”
Burnished. Silk. Copper. Azure. Delicate. Angel. Hallelujah. Suddenly these were the only words he knew.”
― Julie Anne Long

“Words are instruments, they are tools that, in their different ways, are as effective as any sharp edge or violate chemical. They are, like coins, items of great value, but they represent a currency that, well spent, returns ever greater riches.”
― Tim Radford, The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things

“Why can't a girl just want to know stuff and not do stuff?”
― Ellen Mulholland, This Girl Climbs Trees