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“Many more will live,” Rin said, and she was nearly certain that it was true. And even if it wasn’t, she was willing to take that gamble. She knew she would bear full responsibility for the murders she was about to commit, bear the weight of them for as long as she lived. But it was worth it. For the sake of her vengeance, it was worth it. This was divine retribution for what the Federation had wreaked on her people. This was her justice. “They aren’t people,” she whispered. “They’re animals. I want you to make them burn. Every last one.” “And what will you give me in return?” inquired the Phoenix. “The price to alter the fabric of the world is steep.” What did a god, especially the Phoenix, want? What did any god ever want? “I can give you worship,” she promised. “I can give you an unending flow of blood.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“Was this love? It was like a consuming flame, licking through my defenses at a slow burn.”
― Yangsze Choo, The Ghost Bride

“You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore

“Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore