Holly

“And so for a hundred years a forest grew up across the land, tall and dark and impenetrable, whose undergrowth curled and snarled into a thicket of bramble and black thorn. This was a forbidden forest, a tangled briarwood that protected not sleeping princesses in their castles, but the horrors of war that still lay dormant under a thin skin of earth.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“Unseen University was used to eccentricity among the faculty. After all, humans derive their notions of what it means to be a normal human being by constant reference to the human around them, and when those humans are other wizards, the spiral can only wiggle downwards.”
― Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

“Damloup--where offering lie in tribute to the spirits of the ancestors, whose buildings' spectral forms seem to shimmer between the columns of trees, and--the sharp edges of the stones are dressed in felted green, and the water troughs made planters of their own accord. Where the scarlet berries burn like embers under lacquered leaves, and pale butterflied somersault through the shafting light.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“nd I’m so grateful to be able to look back at my childhood, and find this pocket of my memory filled with knowing I was safe, that I belonged, and I had a right to exist. Because these are the memories that were to become my tether once life began to pull me deeper and deeper into a world where safety and belonging were not things I was capable of achieving on my own.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette