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“When I take you to the Valley, you’ll see the blue hills on the left and the blue hills on the right, the rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow late in the rainy season, and maybe you’ll say, “There it is, that’s it!” But I’ll say. “A little farther.” We’ll go on, I hope, and you’ll see the roofs of the little towns and the hillsides yellow with wild oats, a buzzard soaring and a woman singing by the shadows of a creek in the dry season, and maybe you’ll say, “Let’s stop here, this is it!” But I’ll say, “A little farther yet.” We’ll go on, and you’ll hear the quail calling on the mountain by the springs of the river, and looking back you’ll see the river running downward through the wild hills behind, below, and you’ll say, “Isn’t that the Valley?” And all I will be able to say is “Drink this water of the spring, rest here awhile, we have a long way yet to go and I can’t go without you.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“She accepts the world as it is and the world accepts her thus. She is not mastered. What is done to her cannot confine what she will do.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant

“The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, are often more subject to the working of time. Its general encrypting. They are infected by secondary knowledge. By myths.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II

“There can't be one heart for hatred and another for love. We only have one, and I always thought about how to save my heart.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, War's Unwomanly Face