Lucy-May

“For this scribe has read a great many of these accounts and taken away another lesson: that to be a woman is to have your story misremembered. Discarded. Twisted. In courtyard tales, women are the adulterous wives whose treachery begins a husband's descent into murderous madness or the long-suffering mothers who give birth to proper heroes. Biographers polish away the jagged edges of capable, ruthless queens so they may be remembered as saints, and geographers warn believing men away from such and such a place with scandalous tales of lewd local females who cavort in the sea and ravish foreign interlopers. Women are the forgotten spouses and unnamed daughters. Wet nurses and handmaidens; thieves and harlots. Witches. A titillating anecdote to tell your friends back home or a warning.”
― S A Chakraborty

“People like to say they seek the truth. Sometimes they even mean it. The truth is they crave the soft, quilted comfort of a lie. Tell them they’re going to be rich or fall in love, and they walk away whistling. Give them the hard, unvarnished truth, and you’re looking at trouble.”
― Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Square of Sevens

“The finality of a person's life confounded the ego. How could a body and mind that walked, talked, and had brilliant, witty thoughts suddenly cease to be? How could a body shrug off its mortal coil and become common carrion simply because the blood stopped pumping through the veins? How could the mind and all its memories become mere wisps of nothingness floating in the ether because the spark of thought no longer flared bright inside the cranium? The mystery of human death was too grand to be regarded as anything less than sacred by those facing their own mortality.”
― Luanne G. Smith, The Raven Spell

“Hope is a powerful thing. Some say it’s a different breed of magic altogether. Elusive, difficult to hold on to. But not much is needed.”
― Stephanie Garber, Caraval