Sara Elizabeth

“You had crossed over. Everyone admired this. The men, who had nothing to lose, admired it easily, almost without effort. For them, it was enough that you rode, hunted, ate raw liver, survived cruel wounds, that you were a veteran of war. It was enough that you were silent and never complained, that you didn’t speak the che. And of course you were an outsider, no wife or daughter of theirs. For the women, it was more difficult, but they, too, admired you—I know you don’t believe it, but they did. They do. Envy is a kind of admiration. Sneers are so often the product of longing. Many women would like to do as you do. Some have begun, in the aftermath of war. They wear their hair loose. They would like to dress like men, to kill like men. To kill.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“I had no desire to have either dreams or adventures like Alice, and the amount of them merely amused me. I had very little desire to look for buried treasure or fight pirates, and Treasure Island left me cool. Red Indians were better: there were bows and arrows (I had and have a wholly unsatisfied desire to shoot well with a bow), and strange languages, and glimpses of an archaic mode of life, and, above all, forests in such stories. But the land of Merlin and Arthur was better than these, and best of all the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs, and the prince of all dragons. Such lands were pre-eminently desirable.”
― J R R Tolkien

“This dream the world is having about itself
includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,
a groove in the grass my father showed us all
one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell
something better about to happen.”
― William Stafford, The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems

“Outside the window, just past my aunt, spread the windswept sky of Bain. Gulls swung between the towers. The sun struck a distant window that glittered so brightly I thought, for a moment, it was a tear in the corner of my eye. How quickly the world comes down, as if it were only made of paper.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories