Sarah

“I love memories. They are our ballads, our personal foundation myths. But I must acknowledge that memory can be cruel if left unchallenged. Memory is often our only connection to who we used to be. Memories are fossils, the bones left by dead versions of ourselves. More potently, our minds are a hungry audience, craving only the peaks and valleys of experience. The bland erodes, leaving behind the distinctive bits to be remembered again and again. Painful or passionate, surreal or sublime, we cherish those little rocks of peak experience, polishing them with the ever-smoothing touch of recycled proxy living. In so doing—like pagans praying to a sculpted mud figure—we make of our memories the gods which judge our current lives. I love this. Memory may not be the heart of what makes us human, but it’s at least a vital organ. Nevertheless, we must take care not to let the bliss of the present fade when compared to supposedly better days. We’re happy, sure, but were we more happy then? If we let it, memory can make shadows of the now, as nothing can match the buttressed legends of our past. I think about this a great deal, for it is my job to sell legends. Package them, commodify them. For a small price, I’ll let you share my memories—which I solemnly promise are real, or will be as long as you agree not to cut them too deeply. Do not let memory chase you. Take the advice of one who has dissected the beast, then rebuilt it with a more fearsome face—which I then used to charm a few extra coins out of an inebriated audience. Enjoy memories, yes, but don’t be a slave to who you wish you once had been. Those memories aren’t alive. You are.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

“That man is a few eggs short of a dozen - and he doesn't realize the other ten he collected are actually rocks.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

“Well, this isn't the part of the story where you ask questions. So kindly keep them to yourself.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

“She remembered days of exhaustion when all she’d wanted was a kind word, a teardrop’s worth of empathy.
Choice. She had a choice.
'You don’t have to be like her,' Yumi thought. 'You really don’t.'
Such a novel idea, and so much harder to do than she would ever have assumed. Still, Yumi forced out the words. The ones akin to those she always wished she could have heard.
“It’s all right,” she whispered. “I know you’re trying. That’s what matters.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter