K.E Wilhelm

“Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“They drank from a spring which filled an ancient stone trough behind the ruin. Beyond it lay overgrown beds and plants John had never set eyes on before: tall resinous fronds, prickly shrubs, long grey-green leaves hot to the tongue. Nestling among them he found the root whose scent drifted among the trees like a ghost, sweet and tarry. He knelt and pressed it to his nose.
'That was called silphium.' His mother stood behind him. 'It grew in Saturnus's first garden.'
She showed him the most ancient trees in the orchards, their gnarled trunks cloaked in grey lichen. Palm trees had grown there too once, she claimed. Now even their stumps had gone.
Each day, John left the hearth to forage in the wreckage of Belicca's gardens. His nose guided him through the woods. Beyond the chestnut avenue, the wild skirrets, alexanders and broom grew in drifts. John chased after rabbits or climbed trees in search of birds' eggs. He returned with mallow seeds or chestnuts that they pounded into meal then mixed with water and baked on sticks. The unseasonal orchards yielded tiny red and gold-streaked apples, hard green pears and sour yellow cherries.”
― Lawrence Norfolk, John Saturnall's Feast

“When the rest of the world watches the news from America, they see a third world dumpster fire. A failed state.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, American Fascism: A German Writer's Urgent Warning To America

“Hell, like prison, is worse when you don’t feel you earned it.”
― Christopher Buehlman, Between Two Fires