#tory

Possibly, she thought, the pool of answers was limited. There are fewer answers in the world than questions, and if you ask me now why that is so, I must tell you that there is no answer to that question. ↗

— Antonia Michaelis

#fairytale #micha #storytelling

Until a few days ago, humans had been little more than legend to him, and now here he was in their world. It was like stepping into the pages of a book -- a book alive with color and fragrance, filth and chaos -- and the blue-haired girl moved through it all like a fairy through a story, the light treating her differently than it did others, the air seemed to gather around her like held breath. As if this whole place was a story about her. ↗

— Laini Taylor

#light #story #color

It is, I think, the rarest of leisure, hard work mixed with hard pleasure, to refine one's time of deep thought or light regard into the utterly self-absorbed and equally and abundantly outward-seeking shape of the personal essay -- a story comprised of found fact, of analyzed emotion, of fictive memory. ↗

— Barry Lopez

#personal-essay #story #equality

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story. ↗

— Patrick Rothfuss

#self-image #sense-of-self #stories #storytelling #story

There’s a fine line between gossip and history, when one is talking about kings. ↗

— Michelle Cooper

#royalty #gossip

If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being--ever mindful of its personal style. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#conformity #future #history #mainstream #new-orleans

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on. ↗

— William Faulkner

#victory

You predicted quick victory. Now it’s going to get hopelessly complicated. Jesus, don’t you know any better than that by now? ↗

— Jim Butcher

#optimism #pessimism #thomas-raith #victory

Roland glares at Connor and Connor glares back. Then he says what he always says at moments like this. "Nice socks." Although Roland doesn't look down right away, it derails him just enough for him to back off. He doesn't check to see if his socks match until he thinks Connor isn't looking. And the moment he does, Connor snickers. Small victories are bet­ter than none. ↗

— Neal Shusterman

#small-victories #socks #victories #victory #victory

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. ↗

— Frédéric Bastiat

#france #government #history #liberal #libertarian