Shannon

“Though the Ista they thought they loved, she supposed, was an imaginary one, a woman who existed only in their own minds, part icon, part habit. The reflection did not depress her unduly, now that she knew someone who loved the Ista who was real. She fell asleep thinking of him.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Paladin of Souls

“But I made an issue of the precise wording of the vows. I wanted liberalized ones, with no outmoded Pauline nonsense exacting from the bride the promise to 'obey' the groom. Here I put my foot down, rather in the manner of a husband determined to show at the outset who was boss. 'I'll have no obedience around here!' I said, banging the table. 'Is that clear?'
'Is it an order?'
'Yes.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“YEARS AGO I set three "rules" for myself. Every poem I write, I said, must have a genuine body, it must have sincere energy, and it must have a spiritual purpose. If a poem to my mind failed any one of these categories it was rebuked and redone, or discarded. Over the forty or so years during which writing poems has been my primary activity, I have added other admonitions and consents. I want every poem to "rest" in intensity. I want it to be rich with "pictures of the world." I want it to carry threads from the perceptually felt world to the intellectual world. I want each poem to indicate a life lived with intelligence, patience, passion, and whimsy (not my life—not necessarily!—but the life of my formal self, the writer). I want the poem to ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered. I want it to be clear that answering the question is the reader's part in an implicit author-reader pact. Last but not least, I want the poem to have a pulse, a breathiness, some moment of earthly delight. (While one is luring the reader into the enclosure of serious subjects, pleasure is by no means an unimportant ingredient.)”
― Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

“In the space of a sundown, you show me the wide world from a horse’s back, and the soul of the world within my own walls.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand