Winston Jen

“If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“She cast about for her next adversary. She didn't seem to have one. The fight was over, and the few surviving hobgoblins were running away.

"Form up!" she shouted. "I want a column with the traders in the middle. Fast!"

Once the procession was under way, Aunrae, striding along at Greyanna's side, asked, "May I know where we're going? An ally's castle?"

"No," Greyanna replied. "I suspect we couldn't get in. We're going to hide our charges in Bauthwaf."

The column crept past corpses and burning stone, and as they made their way to the cavern wall, other commoners came running out of their homes to join the procession. Greyanna's first impulse was to turn away those without ties to House Mizzrym, but she thought better of it. Many of the newcomers carried swords, and she could press the dolts into martial service if needed.

Occasionally someone collapsed, coughing feebly, poisoned by the stinging smoke. The rest stepped over her and pressed on.

Someone gave a thin, high cry, as if at an unexpected pain. Greyanna spun around. The goblins weren't attacking. Her client the canoe maker had simply seized his opportunity to knife another male in the back.

"A competitor," the craftsman explained.”
― Richard Lee Byers, Dissolution

“I suppose I understand," the priestess said, "but I wonder why it's come to this. All these years, I've never truly understood the basis for our feud. If I'm to die, will you at least tell me why you chose Sabal over me? Was it fondness? Was it lust?"

"Neither," Pharaun chuckled. "My choice had nothing whatever to do with personalities. How could it, when you twins were so alike? I threw in with Sabal simply because she was dangling from the bottom rung of the Mizzrym ladder. I thought it would be an amusing challenge to lift her to the top.”
― Richard Lee Byers

“Whether it is the immigrant family with an enormous council house or a horribly misguided decision to take the Union Flag down from a council building, these instances are news precisely because they are as rare as hen’s teeth. In the hands of an editor like Gallagher, however, they are served up as though commonplace, as proof that ‘we’ are somehow being overwhelmed by ‘them’. It’s heady stuff and leads to people like Bob not even realising that they have developed pungent opinions while possessed of precisely no proof to support them.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong