Shpriken

“The light of life shines up from your birth, and I’d left so much in the way that I had stood for years in twilight, isolated and alone while the person I’d once been still stamped and raved, blocking the light and poisoning the sun.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Only Forward: A Mind-Bending Cyberpunk Mystery About a Private Investigator in a Surreal World

“The way I see it, the truth is just barren moorland, all useless bog and heather. It’s only when you break it up and turn it over with the ploughshare of the Good Lie that you can screw a livelihood out of it. Isn’t that what humans do? They take a dead landscape and reshape it into what they need, and want, and can use. I’ve never hesitated to adapt the world to suit me, when I can get away with it.”
― K.J. Parker, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

“In Paris you had to be ready to fight art and the Hellish—not to mention Nazis—so they labored under weapons for all eventualities.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“Monza never had understood why getting out a tit or two made for a better painting. But painters seemed to think it did, so tits is what you got.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold