Daniel Atkinson

“What’s an oxy, I’d asked. That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Some people knew how to kill a conversation. Cura, on the other hand, could make it wish it had never been born.”
― Nicholas Eames, Bloody Rose

“There is nothing, I think, so wasteful—or so pointlessly tragic—as a battle that should never have been fought in the first place.”
― Nicholas Eames, Bloody Rose