The void is my friend.
Ruko had always wondered how his mother kept her face so blank. Now he understood. You had to open a hole inside yourself and let everything drain through it. The horror, the grief, the guilt. The love. Most of all, the love. Let it drain away until there was no feeling left.
Chapter Three, The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson
“For them,” he says, gesturing at the busy city, “age takes its toll in decades. For us, it is the work of centuries. And it is not measured in wrinkles or gray hair. Where others rot without, we rot within.” He raps his knuckles against his chest. “We are hollowed, bit by bit, as all that made us human dies. Our kindness. Our empathy. Our capacity for fear, and love. One by one they slough away, until all that’s left is the desire to hunt, to hurt, to feed, to kill. That is how we die. Made reckless by our hunger. Convinced we are unkillable until someone or something proves us wrong.”
page 214, Matteo, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab
Everyone knows that when something good happens, something you’ve dreamed of for a long, long time, you’re filled with this wonderful, dizzying, joyfun conviction that there’s nothing in the world beyond your reach. Everyone also knows that as lovely as that feeling is, it’s best not to let it run away with you entirely, because next thing you know, you’ve tried to do too much and you’re wilting on your sofa with two ibuprofen and the sort of headache that makes you feel like there’s a herd of elephants stampeding across your skull.
Chapter 31, A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna
A fair system only works if there’s an unbiased means of assessing merit. When there is no pride or selfishness involved.
page 280, The Will of the Many by James Islington
Everyone knew that the nicer a library was, the better the work you did within it. Nice libraries meant donors, meant support, meant the time and resources to accumulate the best collections. More important, nice libraries put you in a certain frame of mind. You could unpack the precise same set of archives in the Rad Cam or a nondescript warehouse, and still you’d do better work in the Rad Cam. The atmosphere mattered. You became the thinker the library expected you to be. Nice libraries whispered: Everyone who has passed through here is very important, and so are you.
page 83, Katabasis by R.F. Kuang