Paul Daniel Ash

“Nothing to fear from a fate that was already yours, then, except, perhaps, that it would never leave you.”
― Alexander Chee, The Queen of the Night

“Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“talking about the “meaning” of a story, we need to be careful not to diminish it, impoverish it. A story can say different things to different people. It may have no definitive reading. And a reader may find a meaning in it that the writer never intended, never imagined, yet recognizes at once as valid.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“The trouble is, there is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence and, if only because they last so long, great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memory of those who have lived through them, the dreadful days of the plague do not seem like vast flames, cruel and magnificent, but rather like an endless trampling that flattened everything in its path.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague