Kathy Shin

“Burning was a bad way to go, but my reserves of empathy were usually exhausted on orphans and puppies, a lot higher up the list than arsonists and
arseholes.”
― Ed McDonald, Blackwing

“When we weigh up the balance sheet of our lives, it's always easy to see the costs. People we've hurt, mistakes we've made. But the other side of the balance can be harder to make out. How do you measure what didn't happen? Friends who didn't die because of something you did, wars that didn't start, cities that never burned. That has to count for something, doesn't it?"

"You can't know what would have happened," Winter said. "Maybe everyone would have been better off."

"It's possible," Abraham said placidly. "But you can't know that for certain, either. Out of all the possible worlds, we can't know if this is the best, the worst, or somewhere in between. But it's one we've got.”
― Django Wexler, The Infernal Battalion

“The most important things we have are dreams," Isabelle said. "Without them we cannot conjure new truths or better worlds. Where we get into trouble is when we tell ourselves dreams don't matter, or we let other people tell us our dreams are silly or stupid. I dream of peace, and I won't give it up.”
― Curtis Craddock, An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors

“No matter what you did, forty or fifty or a hundred years passed and everything became a narrative to be toyed with, masters of media alchemy splitting the truth's nucleus into a ricocheting cascade reaction of diverging alternate realities.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing