Laura Jefferson

“Wherever humans garden magnificently, there are magnificent heartbreaks.... I never see a great garden, (even in my mind's eye, which is the best place to see great gardens around here), but I think of the calamities that have visited it, unsuspected by the delighted gardener who supposes, "It must be nice to garden there."
It is not nice to garden anywhere. Everywhere there are startling winds, once in every five centuries floods....
Now the gardener is the one who has seen everything ruined so many times that, even as his pain increases with each loss, he comprehends, truly knows, that where there was a garden once there can be again.”
― Henry Mitchell, The Writer in the Garden

“He sighed and opened the black box and took out his rings and slipped them on. Another box held a set of knives and Klatchian steel, their blades darkened with lamp black. Various cunning and intricate devices were taken from velvet bags and dropped into pockets. A couple of long-bladed throwing tlingas were slipped into their sheaths inside his boots. A thin silk line and folding grapnel were wound around his waist, over the chain-mail shirt. A blowpipe was attached to its leather thong and dropped down the back of his cloak; Teppic picked a slim tin container with an assortment of darts, their tips corked and their stems braille-coded for ease of selection in the dark.

He winced, checked the blade of his rapier and slung the baldric over his right shoulder, to balance the bag of lead slingshot ammunition. As an afterthought he opened his sock drawer and took a pistol crossbow, a flask of oil, a roll of lockpicks and, after some consideration, a punch dagger, a bag of assorted caltrops and a set of brass knuckles.

Teppic picked up his hat and checked it's lining for the coil of cheesewire. He placed it on his head at a jaunty angle, took a last satisfied look at himself in the mirror, turned on his heel and, very slowly, fell over.”
― Terry Pratchett, Pyramids

“Gimli wept openly.

"I have looked the last on that which was fairest," he said to Legolas his companion. "Henceforth I will call nothing fair unless it be her gift." He put his hand to his breast.

"Tell me Legolas, why did I come on this Quest? Little did I know where the chief peril lay! Truly Elrond spoke, saying that we could not foresee what we might meet upon our road. Torment in the dark was the danger that I feared, and it did not hold me back. But I would not have come, had I known the danger of light and joy.”
― J R R Tolkien

“Queer' not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
― bell hooks