Tanja Smith

“They have special laws for pretty girls twenty-one."
"So you think I was pretty?"
He nodded good-humoredly.
"But how can you tell?" she asked. "When you meet a dragon that has eaten a swan, do you guess by the few feathers left around the mouth? That's what it is- a body like this is a dragon, all scales and folds. So the dragon ate the white swan. I haven't seen her for years. I can't even remember what she looks like. I feel her, though. She's safe inside, still alive; the essential swan hasn't changed a feather. Do you know, there are some mornings in spring or fall, when I wake and think, I'll run across the fields into the woods and pick wild strawberries! Or I'll swim in the lake, or I'll dance all night tonight until dawn! And then, in a rage, discover I'm in this old and ruined dragon. I'm the princess in the crumbled tower, no way out, waiting for her Prince Charming.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Though she be but little, she is fierce!”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water