Esther Daang

“I wasn't pretty, but as my mother once said, prettiness wasn't my profession.”
― Jonathan Stroud, The Screaming Staircase

“Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.”
― Tom Rachman

“- Plan F, we follow Plan F, right now.
- Is that the one where we run away?
- Not at all. It's the one where we beat a dignified emergency retreat.”
― Jonathan Stroud, The Whispering Skull

“I wanted to show, as Tooly's life enfolds [in The Rise & Fall of Great Powers], how one's earliest stories condition how one encounters the world: what one expects of strangers, whether one counts on justice, whether one veers into cynicism or veers back again.”
― Tom Rachman, The Rise & Fall of Great Powers