Caroline

“Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling,” she said, the fog of anesthesia wearing off. She could see him clearly now. The curl of his lashes. The white flecks of skin over his dry lips. “Me too. I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn’t decide what it wanted to be?” “I think it doesn’t matter because we get to decide what our bodies are or are not,” he answered. Aster sat up, and Theo helped her prop two pillows beneath her head. “Is that so? Then I am magic. I say it, therefore it is true,” she said.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“Of course, it is likely enough, my friends," he said slowly, "likely enough that we are going to our dooms: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“In the feed, ART started to play the soundtrack to Sanctuary Moon and weirdly, that helped.”
― Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

“And here he was, a little halfling from the Shire, a simple hobbit of the quiet countryside, expected to find a way where the great ones could not go, or dared not go. It was an evil fate.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers