Euan

“Music is the common property of all humanity, but people come from particular groups. For as long as the song lasts, for as long as they say nothing, you can pretend you are part of the same group.”
― Sam J. Miller, Blackfish City

“I went into the tent, and lay staring into the shadows until sleep picked me up, and I flew with burning fire-feathered wings across the black cliffs of my doubt.

Below, a great stretch of water crinkled moonlight. I soared above it, and away to the south, saw a shoreline scattered with broken, bone-white cities. I wheeled toward them, the wing-thrust in my ears like a wind-drum, beating with my heart. Over the black bright rollers of the sea, where the froth burst silver on the faces of the dunes and the bastions of crested rocks like the shattered bodies of dragons, eagles, giants.”
― Tanith Lee, The Birthgrave

“One has serious reason to doubt one is as sane as one had hoped.”
― John Gardner

“I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason. If I could see not one single soul in that wilderness of desolation all around me, then the six of us-mounts and riders both-could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things when the good Lord opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars tumble out. Understand, then, that though I would not say I privately engaged in metaphysical speculation as we rode through the reedy approaches to the river, I certainly meditated on the nature of my own state, how I had been bought and sold, passed from hand to hand. That clockwork girl who powdered my cheeks for me; had I not been allotted only the same kind of imitative life amongst men that the doll-maker had given her?”
― Angela Carter