Mehak

“Those the walkers carried into the Wood were less lucky. We didn't know what happened to them, but they came back out sometimes, corrupted in the worst way: smiling and cheerful, unharmed. They seemed almost themselves to anyone who didn't know them well, and you might spend half a day talking with one of them and never realize anything was wrong, until you found yourself taking up a knife and cutting off your own hand, putting out your own eyes, your own tongue, while they kept talking all the while, smiling, horrible. And then they would take the knife and go inside your house, to your children, while you lay outside blind and choking and helpless even to scream. If someone we loved was taken by the walkers, the only thing we knew to hope for them was death, and it could only be a hope.”
― Naomi Novik, Uprooted

“What had the Romans been thinking, with their Venus? Love ought to have been a man, tall and broad and glistening as he broke the surface, not to drift about on an insipid clamshell as the painters had it, but to stride under his own power out of the waves up onto land, the ocean’s bounty made manifest for every woman in a fifty-mile radius.”
― Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened

“A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“You've always believed war to be a grand performance. But to me it's just killing, just the ugliest thing a person can ever do...So when you need to do it, there's no need to make a show of it.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades