Alena

“The crowd cheered louder. Blood pounded hard in my head, began to drown out everything else. The performers continued to trade fire, and I wondered at how clinical the whole thing felt. A sanitized version of the violence that had plagued the prairie ever since the European settlers decided to press their way West. This was a performance for romantics, who read about such struggles in dime novels and eastern newspapers. They clapped and laughed and traded jabs with one another about how many Indians they’d have killed if just given the chance and a well-oiled long rifle. My stomach boiled and my heart hurt. None of these people had felt someone’s hot blood staining their fine clothes. None of them had smelled death up close. They cheered as the occasional Indian tumbled from his horse, felled by Frank’s imaginary bullets, but there was no question the victims would all get back up again. Limbs still attached. Chest cavities untroubled by flattened chunks of lead. It was a celebration of death, and I hated it.”
― Josh Rountree, The Unkillable Frank Lightning

“Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath. Beside me, my husband's pulse beats at his throat; in their beds, my children's skin shows every faintest scratch. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations. I do not forget either my father and his kind hanging over us, bright and sharp as swords, aimed at our tearing flesh. If they do not fall on us in spite and malice, then they will fall by accident or whim. My breath fights in my throat. How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom? I rise then and go to my herbs. I create something, I transform something. My witchcraft is as strong as ever, stronger. This too is good fortune. How many have such power and leisure and defense as I do? Telemachus comes from our bed to find me. He sits with me in the greensmelling darkness, holding my hand. Our faces are both lined now, marked with our years. Circe, he says, it will be all right. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I have heard him say them to our daughters, when he rocked them back to sleep from a nightmare, when he dressed their small cuts, soothed whatever stung. His skin is familiar as my own beneath my fingers. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean it does not hurt. He does not mean we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I expected the members of Earth’s leading society of villains to be smarter,” I said. “I don’t know why.” “They’re smarter in movies and books.” “They would have to be, wouldn’t they?” Morrison said. “In the real world, they can be what people like them usually are: a bunch of dudes born into money who used that money to take advantage of other people to make even more money. It works great until they start believing that being rich makes them smart, and then they get in trouble. Unless they find someone else to take advantage of.”
― John Scalzi, Starter Villain