Dolorous Haze

“We walk in deception and must build the most honest world we know.”
― Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

“Family is only the tribe in microcosm. Long ago Thoacdiens realized—since their business is information, and information is not static—that, technology aside, the prime source of their capital was the unbridled imagination of each individual in each successive generation. The family is not only an inefficient system, it is a cruel one. The whole object of the family is to repeat itself, to create the future in the image of the past. Consequently it is a very effective brake on change because it keeps all children within the boundaries of cultural tradition. In the family learning is a process of psychological brutality at the end of which a child knows nothing but what is permissible to the tribe. There is no future, and no joy in the family—only the long, agonized, destructive groan of the continual death of the past. Once in a while there is friendship, but that is the exception, not the rule.”
― Mary Staton, From the Legend of Biel

“Here, she said, there was no need to create stories of witches whose solution to everything was to simply devour the children.”
― J.M. Hushour, Weatherhead

“..fairy was delusion, so was the law. At any rate, it was a sort of magic, moulding reality into any shape it chose.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist