Caroline Niziol

“He held up a bottle of wine. ‘Tonight, we celebrate!’ I sighed. ‘I don’t think I’m in the mood.’ He held up the bottle again. ‘Tonight, we drown our sorrows!’ ‘In fact, I think I might be in a lot of trouble.’ He held up the bottle again. ‘Tonight, we formulate our battle plan and drink to success!’ I gave up and put my key in the door. ‘Actually, I don’t have a problem with any of that. Come on in.”
― Jodi Taylor, Dark Light

“The only thing that isn’t worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don’t.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Magic doesn’t require beauty,” she said. “Easy magic is pretty. Great magic asks that you trouble the waters. It requires a disruption, something new.”
― Leigh Bardugo, The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic

“History inks the skin: it writes on the hide of sheep long slaughtered, or calves who never breathed; the dead cut away the ground beneath us, so that when he descends a stair at Austin Friars, the tread falls away under his foot, and below him there is another stair, no longer visible except in the mind’s eye; and down it goes, to the city where the legions of Rome left their ashes beneath the earth, their glass in the soil, their bones in the river. And down it plunges and down, into the subsoil of himself, through France and Italy and the pays bas, through the lowlands and the quicksands, by the marshes and meadows estuarine, through the floodplains of his dreams to where he wakes, shocked into a new day: the clang of the anvil from the smithy shakes the sunlight in a room where, a helpless child, he lies swaddled, startled from sleep, feeling as if for the first time the beat of his own heart.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light