Shawn

“The landlord of The Fiddler’s Riddle considered himself to be a man of the world, and this was right, because he was too stupid to be really cruel, and too lazy to be really mean and although his body had been around quite a lot his mind had never gone further than the inside of his own head.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“Ida was a planetary woman. She knew—she had seen it proved in math, in words—that the apparent safety of a planet’s solid ground beneath her feet was based on precisely the same physical laws that described the construction of a spaceship, that there was no real difference between the solidity of dirt beneath her feet and the hollowness of sculpted carbon and iron. She knew this for the fact that it was, but Ida Stays was a planetary woman, and it was with a planetary woman’s fear that she froze in the darkness, because Ida did not believe in God, did not believe in any gods at all, only the cold fact of existence and man’s ability to work within the inflexible laws of nature, but somehow she, so human, so unmechanical, somehow she trusted the engineer that had constructed the planets far more than the human ones who had built the ships that flew between them.”
― C.A. Higgins, Lightless

“He took a deep settling breath then said, “What man, having mastered himself, should fear any king?”
― Jay Posey, Every Sky a Grave

“Turtle, Bette, and the others all go inside the coffee place, but I pause out in the parking lot, with its scenic view of the wind-beaten sign for the Little Darlings strip club. Rachael sees me and hangs back too.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, Victories Greater Than Death