All Kj Quotes

My life changed four months ago, and I utterly failed to understand that until just recently, and therefore… I may have omitted to tell you that I love you.” He took a breath. “That’s all.

He turned away, and suddenly she thought about the old children's story, where the stupid girl opens the box that God gave her, and all the evils of the world fly out, except Hope, which stays at the bottom; and she wondered what Hope was doing in there in the first place, in with all the bad things. Then the answer came to her, and she wondered how she could've been so stupid. Hope was in there because it was evil too, probably the worst of them all, so heavy with malice and pain that it couldn't drag itself out of the opened box.

Stephen can, of course, use my power, for two reasons. Firstly, because it’s his, just as all I am and all I have are his. Not that he ever asks, of course. I’m not sure that he quite believes it.” He looked round at Stephen, a rueful smile dawning, ignoring Fairley’s loud noises of disgust. “But I do hope you are aware, my sweet, somewhere in that absurd heart, that I am ever, entirely, and quite pathetically yours.

It’s a bizarre but widespread myth that only heroes have good qualities, and the only qualities heroes have are good; villains are, by definition, all bad. Bullshit.

How can anyone doubt the existence of God when evidence of His sense of humour surrounds us on all sides?

I'm a very busy man" Crane said. "But I suppose I could force myself back here, lick you all over till you're begging for my cock, and then fuck you so hard they'll hear you screaming in the street. If you insist

I think once an author is attacking people for leaving Amazon reviews, common sense has shut up shop and gone home, and the best thing to do is not engage at all.

Arrogant , beautiful, domineering Lord Crane, with the caring that made Stephen’s heart break, and the vicious streak that made his knees bend, had chosen him among all the men’s men of London, and treated him with a loyalty, generosity and almost painful honesty that made Stephen’s heart hurt. And his reward was a few doled-out crumbs of Stephen’s time in a country he hated.

See, this is why I hate Google. You come across one site, match one symptom, and all of a sudden you’re dying of carbon monoxide poisoning or cancer of the big toe.

Heroic," Crane told Baines contemptuously. "Old women, idiot children, bound men, you'll take on all comers. There's a three-legged stray dog hangs around the lanes here. Perhaps someday you could work up to kicking that.

It is my aim, and would be my privilege, to ruin you for all others for a very long time to come.

All pain triggers a reminder, deeper than thought, buzzing through blood and bone, that we are fragile and finite.

I really don’t understand why people go on about how wonderful the truth is. In my experience, all it does is make trouble.

The last time I knew this much fuck-all, we was on a boat to China.

When you get to my age, you’ll find it’s fatally easy to forget to hate all your enemies all the time; and once you’ve slipped up and not hated one of them, it makes it almost impossibly hard to hate the rest of them.

I couldn’t breathe when I was away from you. It felt as though each breath was just enough to sustain me, but I was slowly dying. When I saw you again, I had a reason to breathe and then I messed up. I’m so sorry for everything I said to you on the pier, and for all of the pain I’ve caused you. I swear I will never leave you again." - Brady

Guy stared at the words. “Broken leg,” he repeated. His voice sounded odd. “I fear so, sir,” the servant said. “Sir Philip and Mr. Raven found Miss Frisby in a field, I understand.” “But—is she all right?” “No, sir. Her leg is broken.

I have no quarrel with democrats in principle, except that they are as much frauds and liars as the rest. It is often said that mankind will not be free till the last king is strangled with the guts of the last priest; if you ask me, the man who ordered the strangling would promptly step forth to proclaim himself Lord Protector, and it would all begin again.

Time steals from us the capacity to be smitten, does it not? It slowly but surely washes away all your enthusiasm and deposits uncertainty in its place.

Such an easy thing, to be liked. All you had to do was make sure people didn’t know you.

Suffering whispers, shouts, and screams the story no one wants to remember: we are not in control, and we are all going to die.

Because that’s how life tends to work in all its aspects. We try things out, and make mistakes, and recover, and learn from our experiences.

That was the sort of thing people said and then it turned out they hadn’t meant that at all. Clem knew he didn’t recognise sarcasm because he had been told so, repeatedly. Even so, he was very nearly positive that Mr. Green meant every word.

Listen. Whatever the hell is going on, and I include the Bruton bitch in that, we will face it together. You and me. No more pissing about, Stephen, no more trying to do it all yourself, or to run the world single-handed. You will ask for help, you will take it, and you will put us first. That's not negotiable, understand?

I’m well aware of my good fortune. I’m well aware I ought to be happy, we all ought to be happy as the day is long, and dance the night away on the bodies of starving workers. Well, I’m not bloody happy.” He knocked back his gin. It rasped down his throat like a rusty blade. Silas watched him as he tried not to cough it back up. “If you can’t be happy, then be something else. Be useful, that would be good. Decorative, if you like. Selfish, if you must. But don’t whine about it.

A future. You know the concept? The shape you want the rest of your life to take? I want mine with you, all of it. A future, a forever. I love you.” He said it quite calmly, as if it was an established fact. “People say I love you to madness, but I love you to sanity, because loving you is the sanest thing I have ever done. You are everything to me, Will, and I cannot lose you to my miserable family and an accident of birth.

I am always a different man; a reinterpretation of the man I was yesterday, and the day before, and all the days I have lived. The past is gone, was always gone; it does not exist, except in memory, and what is memory but thought, a copy of perception, no less but no more replete with truth than any passing whim, fancy, or other agitation of the mind. And if it is actions, words, thoughts that define an individual, those definitions alter like the weather - if continuity and pattern are often discernible, so are chaos and sudden change.

... why have we all decided that the most important and to-be-respected quality is the one possessed by the worst people?

all the faith you can muster won’t push your suffering over the edge of the cliff into your past,

I like that you’re concerned for me but, not to get all puffed up about it—” “If you say, ‘I’m Joss Doomsday’, I will push you off this log.” “I am, though,” Joss said, grinning.

I’ll manage,” Kim said. “All I need to know is that you’re with me today and will be here tomorrow. If I can have today and tomorrow on a rolling basis—” “Yes.

And if what we hear from God’s people is largely the language of try hard and triumph, the sugar-lipped expectation that we’ll get better and move on, when our efforts are futile and triumph seems distant, we might just believe that the story of Jesus isn’t for us or isn’t even true. Prolonged pain becomes shame, a hidden hurt that we might not be loved by God after all.

My guess is, they couldn't sleep, and they had the kind of generous nature that reckons insomnia isn't something you hoard all for yourself, you share it with your friends and loved ones.

Your people are not unwise, after all: love of the perfect Deity may prevent us from loving imperfect man! But God's will is to restore the lost; and that can't be done without loving them.

I like you, Hart. You might try believing that, and if you can’t, you’re a fool to consort with me at all. Think about it and make your decision. But don’t shout at me because you’re afraid.

He met Kim’s dark eyes. “I think about you all the time. I see you hurt and it makes me want to burn things to the ground. I don’t know what a future’s supposed to look like or how it would work, but I’m not letting you go without a fight, no matter what. I don’t know what I’d do all day.

To try and rationalise all this in terms of right, wrong, good, evil, is just naive; the very worst things we do, after all, we do for love, and the very worst pain we feel comes from love. She was right about that. In my opinion, love is the greatest and most enduring enemy, because love gives rise to the memories that kill us, slowly, every day. I think a man who never encounters love might quite possibly live forever. He'd have to, because if he died, who the hell would ever remember him?

He'd always wanted to stand alone ; he'd always thought of reliance on others as a house of cards, a fragile structure that could be pushed over at any time. And that was true : people betrayed, and left, and died. He hadn't been wrong. Only, he hadn't considered that a card on its own couldn't stand at all.

I was holding myself together by my fingernails for a very long time, until the most magnificently stubborn sod of a bookseller came into my life. You treated me, against all the evidence, as if I were something resembling the man I ought to be, with such pertinacious obstinacy I have all but started to believe it myself. I spent the last few months thinking about this as I reordered your outrageous mess of a bookshop. How I came to be where I was, what I’d done to bring it on myself. What I need to do differently.

It occurs to me that my thinking has been faulty: we do not feel God's absence. We feel the absence of all that is lost to God, that which has set itself apart and refuses to return, believing itself to be in exile.

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It’s like—all right, supposing there’s a fire. What do you do? You grab everyone and everything you can and you get the hell out of there. You don’t agonise about letting the fire win. Staying alive doesn’t make you the fire’s accomplice.

But I don’t think you have. I feel more—more loving, in all the different ways, than I ever have in my life. I feel as though, while you love me, I could be better and kinder to the whole world. If that’s not virtue, I don’t know what is.

When I came to this city, I would have agreed with anyone who said there was little mystery left in the world. But in you, madam, first in your image, then in your living self, I saw the allure of something far away and as secret as the stars. As I reached towards this unknown, I began to feel like a man who has ridden through a vast desert, never knowing anything but the sand around him and the dry road under him, then comes upon the mirage of a garden and a city, and finds that the mirage is real, and that it is bigger than the desert; that the desert was, after all his walking, only a small part of the mirage” “Then you felt love, which is the state of feeling desire and the fulfillment of desire at the same time,” she said.

Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just objects - inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history, context, rarity - perhaps rarity most of all - combine to create, magically, the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury - one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated way - as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick - to make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age.

He was astonished at how calm he found he was. Fear of death had always energised him, making him move far more quickly than his body should have been capable of, accelerating his reactions and his thought process to a quite incredible level. This time, though, he only thought, Oh, and realised that he didn't really care all that much. He could feel his responsibilities, the love of others towards him, the unfulfilled possibilities; they were like a child's hand trying to pull him up, doing its best but simply not strong enough for the job. Above all, there was no blame. I tried to climb a wall, but I couldn't, and there it is.

You make it so easy,” Hart whispered, because his throat was closing. “How is all this so easy for you?” “I think I have a different idea of what makes life hard.” Hart couldn’t find a response to that. After a moment Robin said, “Sorry. That didn’t come out quite as I intended.” “Happens to me all the time.” “But it was stupid. Something difficult for you isn’t less difficult because other people have different problems.” “More serious ones.” “It’s your life. You decide what constitutes a problem in it.

I wouldn’t dream of it.” Kim caught his hand and kissed the palm. “I couldn’t. You changed everything, Will. My life, my work, myself. It’s all changed—all better—because of you.” “You did that yourself, you daft sod. I just shouted at you a bit.” “A lot. God, I adore you.

If you tell me no, I will be silent. If you prefer, I shall never ask again. But you should know that I would plead on my knees. If I thought you wanted me there.' "To win my help?" "Be damned to your help. I want your mouth, and your hands, and your hair, and your eyes. I want to stop feeling as though half of my world has gone missing. That puts no obligation on you, none at all, but it is the truth. Do as you wish with it.

Kim’s shoulders heaved. “I had an idea that if you were with me it wouldn’t matter. Instead it’s so much worse because I’m seeing it all through your eyes. Christ knows what you must think.” “I think your family are arseholes.” “Apart from that.” “No, that’s pretty much it. Absolute arseholes.

Maybe all he could do was be the port in Kim’s storm, but that was what he’d do, for as long as it took.

The Duke nodded to them all, and walked out. As he left, Leo started to speak. Louisa told him to shut up again.

You said what you wanted, that’s all, and since it was very easy for me to get what I wanted while giving you what you wanted—

It’s the way my mind works, when it works at all. Things to do today: settle down, achieve serenity, live happily ever after. Tick the box and move on.

You let all your clients rest their hands on your ass?

We can all kill people. I could have put a pillow over your face while you slept at any time in the last twenty years, and I’m struggling to recall why I haven’t.

He'd been apprenticed to a joiner before the war, but that felt like decades ago: all he was good at now was killing people, which was discouraged.

He never makes notes, he just remembers it all, like a barmaid.

Men could rant and rave all they chose; if a woman did the same, she showed herself a slave to her emotions.

Firstly, because it’s his, just as all I am and all I have are his.

Lets grow old together, away from all the self absorbed losers.

Will had been brought up with the belief in what was right and proper that was all the firmer for being unexamined.

All his life he'd dealt in honour and service, the way a furrier deals in furs or a vintner in wine. On his lips the terms had had specialised political meanings, and he'd long since stopped thinking about what the words stood for in the world at large. Now, unfortunately a little bit too late, he'd been granted a little gleam of insight; service is what makes you stand in the line when nobody would try and stop you if you ran away, and honour is what's left when every other conceivable reason for staying there has long since evaporated.

The people turn out to be—well, people; a collective noun for all those individual men and women, none of them perfect, some of them downright vicious, most of them monumentally stupid. As stupid as the emperor, the great hereditary lords, the priestly hierarchs, the General Staff and the Lords of the Admiralty, the merchant princes and the organised crime barons.

I don’t aim to be a poster boy for anxiety and depression. Anxiety and depression deserve a collage, a collage of all the amazing people that have to wrestle with these monsters daily

Ah, the people. My countrymen, my fellow citizens, my brothers. Mind you, some of them are all right, when you get to know them. But a lot of them aren’t; and here’s a funny thing, because when you mix them together, the ones that are all right and the ones that aren’t, as often as not the resulting blend is far worse than the sum of its parts. Greedier, more cowardly, more stupid.

Could your god and this infernal be called enemies, then?" "It is more complicated than that. God knew what was going to happen, of course. The divine has a plan for the infernal. Because all is of God and nothing of God can truly be destroyed, the infernal must instead be transmuted. It must realise its error, comprehend the illogicality of its existence, and choose to become part of the divine. When all is converted, the erroneous potential will no longer exist. Perfection will be achieved. We are all subjects, substances, in this greatest alchemy, the Great Work of God.

The way I see it, the truth is just barren moorland, all useless bog and heather. It’s only when you break it up and turn it over with the ploughshare of the Good Lie that you can screw a livelihood out of it. Isn’t that what humans do? They take a dead landscape and reshape it into what they need, and want, and can use. I’ve never hesitated to adapt the world to suit me, when I can get away with it.

It occurred to Raule that all children were monsters in the world and were instinctively aware of it. They were reminded of their anomalous nature by adults, whom they failed to resemble, and with whose habitations and tools their bodies were at odds. This was surely why the little girl played with the sequins so solemnly and with such intense concentration. She was doing nothing less than conjuring, out of pattern and colour, a world that conformed to her desires and obeyed her will. The boy, on the other hand, showed with the whole attitude of his being that he knew there was only the one world and he would kill it if he could.

Every man, woman and child, regardless of age, ability, nationality, religion, sexual orientation or social class was valuable and must be treated as such. His task, he realised, was finding someone to buy them all.

The girls hurried off in a whirl of goodbyes. Will turned to Kim as the door shut. “Bloody hell.” “Quite. We’re ahead, Will, for the first time in all this. I could sing. I won’t, to spare you distress, but I could.

The way you talk to me, the way you think, the ways you lie, even. Every damn thing about you. You drive me out of my mind, Kim. It’s been months and I can’t think of anything but you. And I suppose all that means I love you, but that—the words—” “Not right?” “Not enough. What it comes down to is—” He couldn’t find a better way to say it. “I don’t like it when you aren’t there. It pisses me off; I think it always will. Don’t piss me off?

He wanted his secretary. He wasn’t sure how you went about worshipping a man in bed but he wanted to find out and do it. He wanted to know what pleased him and do it all, piece by piece, until one or both of them was a babbling wreck.

There’s no point waiting for me to do otherwise. There’s no point waiting for me at all.” “I haven’t been waiting for you,” Will said indignantly. “I haven’t happened to meet anyone else I wanted to fuck, but that’s not the same thing.

Zeb was not a particularly logical thinker, at least in the commonly accepted sense. His train of thought didn’t generally chug from station to station in an orderly manner, taking him from A to B to C on the rails that other people would use.

I've always had this theory, that we're all born with a certain optimum age, the age we're really meant to be, and once we reach it we stick there, in our minds, where it counts. Personally I've always been twenty-five. I was good at being twenty-five.

But during that time, all the wise scholars and profound thinkers who ran the place fell to brooding on the nature of human society, and came to the conclusion that, left to itself, it didn’t work terribly well. And why? Because, they argued, plausibly enough, it tends to be run by idiots; kings (ruled by their own base desires and hopelessly interbred) or dictators (anyone who seizes power by that very act disqualifies himself from being trusted with it) or oligarchies (irredeemably self-serving and corrupt) or, God help us, democracies (in the republic of the stupid, the half-witted man is prime minister) – there had to be a better way, and to the wisest men in the known world, it was painfully obvious what it was. If a job needs doing, do it ourselves.

He’s not asking you to predict where you’ll be in ten years, you idiot. He’s just telling you he wants you to be with him—you, with your grammar school manners and working hands and punching people when you oughtn’t—and asking if you want it too. That’s all a future is.

But (he explained to me, when I objected) what the people want is something that looks at first sight like real life, but which actually turns out to be a fairy tale with virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns.

I don't need fidelity, or adoration, or extravagant vows. Those are all will-o'-the-wisps. Whereas good manners require effort." And so we rode on, talking for all the world as though we were not two murderers in the process of committing treason at a funeral, and I can only say, that is what Ruritania and Rupert Hentzau do to a man.

Kim stared at him, eyes wide, and Will didn’t even think. He just kissed him, hard, and felt Kim’s mouth responding desperately, hands clutching his shoulders, hanging on for dear life. Kissing in the open because nothing at all mattered at this moment but to know they were together. The rest could wait for later, if there was a later.

It came to something when you found yourself hoping that the footsteps you heard were ghosts.

He hadn’t realised you could write about fucking like that. There was cheap filth, and there was stuff like Women in Love, which had been accused of obscenity as if anyone could find the good bits in all that waffle. Will had given up on page seventeen. The point was, he’d always thought you could have Pornography or you could have Literature. He hadn’t believed you could do both at once.

Everything changes, see above. Nothing changes more often, more rapidly or more radically than the past. Yesterday’s heroes are today’s villains. Yesterday’s eternal truths are today’s exploded myths. Yesterday’s right is today’s wrong, yesterday’s good is today’s evil. And tomorrow it’ll all be one hundred and eighty degrees different, on that you can rely. Which is odd, since the past has already happened; it’s done, complete, finished, signed off, sealed, delivered; dead. But, then, dead things change a hell of a lot, as the smell testifies. I tend to think of the past as compost; drifts of dead yesterdays rotting down into a fine mulch, in which all sorts of weeds germinate, sprout and flourish. Of course, the past changes, it can’t not change, and what was true yesterday— See above, passim. Change and decay in all around I see; everything changes, except for me.

Lysimachus probably wouldn’t have listened at all. More likely, he’d have smacked her across the face. Funny, really. I could unleash violence and death on women and children in Mahec, but I could no more hit a woman than fly in the air; because I’m civilised, I suppose. I guess the difference is between what happens offstage and on. A manager once told me, you can have your hero butcher entire nations in a messenger’s report, but for God’s sake don’t have him hit a woman or a child on stage. You’d lose all sympathy.

Screw all mental illness stigma. Having the courage to admit yourself for psychiatric care to heal is phenomenal. Shrugging off a panic attack is badass. Battling through intense spells of fatigue and demotivation is incredible. Going to the psychologist to attend to your mental health is a boss move. Achieving things despite having little to no interest or pleasure is impressive. Frequently practicing self-care is fantastic. Picking yourself up after hitting rock bottom is exceptional. Openly talking about your mental health struggles is courageous. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

The result was a sort of condensed literature, an essence of nutriment, a sublimate of art. It was a device which Mallarmé after first employing it only sparingly in his earlier works, had openly and boldly adopted in a piece he wrote on Théophile Gautier and in the l’Après-midi du faune, an eclogue in which the subtleties of sensual joys were unfolded in mysterious, softly suggestive verses, broken suddenly by this frantic, wild-beast cry of the Faun: "Alors m’éveillerai-je à la ferveur première, Droit et seul sous un flot antique de luminère, Lys! et l’un de vous tous pour l’ingénuité." Then shall I awake to the pristine fervour, standing upright and alone under an old-world flood of light, Flower of the lily! and the one of you all for innocence!

What did normal people do after dark, the ones who weren’t nameless strangers with no memories, the ones who didn’t earn their livings in the death and intrigue business? He tried to work it out from first principles. The ones who worked hard all day would go home and sleep; if they weren’t tired they’d light a lamp and mend their clothes or their tools, sing, tell stories, make love, whatever. Somehow he couldn’t imagine it, any more than he could imagine what giants or elves or gods did in their spare time when they weren’t being legends. Far more plausible to assume that they didn’t exist in the dark, or if they didn’t simply disappear when nobody could see them they sat still and quiet, inanimate, waiting for daybreak and the turn of the next page.

I drew a long breath so I could point out to her all the fallacies in her argument, but then I thought; why? Out of an overwhelming duty to the truth? Fuck, as I may have observed before, the truth. If it was here, would it go out of its way to defend me? Unlikely. The truth is utterly selfish and doesn’t give a damn about anyone else. Serving the truth is like serving the empire. Nobody thanks you for it and you die poor. Besides, what is the truth, anyway? In a court of law, it’s the testimony of credible witnesses corroborating each other. She’d been a witness and she knew what she saw. So was I, but even my mother wouldn’t say I was credible. And there’d been hundreds of people there, all rock-solid upright pillars of Dejauzi society. And when I stabbed myself, there were loads of people watching, and they saw what happened with their own eyes. And, come to that, Alyattes was now the nephew of the old emperor and the rightful heir to the throne. He hadn’t been until quite recently, but pretty soon anyone who could testify against his claim would be dead or singing a very different tune, and what was once a lie would become the truth, official, carved on the lintels of triumphal arches; and if you can’t believe what you read on a government arch, what can you believe? All the books would tell it that way, and in a thousand years’ time it will be the truth, just as what was once the bottom of the sea is now a mountaintop. Ask the wise men at the university what truth is and they’ll tell you it’s the consensus of informed and qualified scholars, based on the best evidence available. Availability is governed by what gets burned in the meanwhile, but I see no real problem with that. All living things change or else they die, and why should the truth be any different?

for you?" Robbie asked me quietly. "Good!" I blurted, my heart slamming against my rib cage. It's…it's good." " Good," he replied. My palms were totally slick by now. My pulse a rushing freight train. What was going on here? This was how I felt around Cameron, not Robbie. This was all totally wrong. It's just the slow dance, KJ. It's just because it's your first slow dance. Don't get all carried away. " Okay, here comes the twirl thing," Robbie announced. " Let's try it." He pulled me closer and my breath caught, then he spun me away and I almost lost my balance, but he pulled me back in, slung by his arm around my back, and dipped me, never letting me fall. By the time I stood up again, the whole room was reeling and the people on the screen were kissing passionately and Robbie was holding me, his breath short and quick, his face ever so close to mine. " How was that?" he asked. "That was…that…was" Just the dance. Just the slow dance. Cameron was the guy I liked. Cameron, Cameron, Cameron. "Perfect.

There’s a story about a young palace clerk who’d had word that his childhood sweetheart back in his home village was being courted by the local tanner. He couldn’t afford the bribe for a warrant of absence, so he forged despatches from military intelligence, which misled the joint chiefs of the defence staff into thinking the Hasrut were planning to invade. The joint chiefs went to the emperor and persuaded him to levy the biggest conscript army the empire had ever seen, in order to deal with the Hasrut once and for all. The young clerk wangled a posting as a deputy assistant quartermaster with the expeditionary force, which he accompanied just as far as the turning off the Great Military Road that led to his village, two miles away. The army, meanwhile, continued into Hasrut territory, was ambushed at the Two Horns and wiped out to the last man, leading in turn to the fall of the Nineteenth Dynasty and thirty years of civil war. Moral: even the humblest of us can make a difference, and it’s love that makes the world go round, or at least wobble horribly.

It’s a bizarre but widespread myth that only heroes have good qualities, and the only qualities heroes have are good; villains are, by definition, all bad. Bullshit. Think about it. Think of the qualities it takes to be a successful or even competent criminal. You need courage—to climb into a stranger’s house, the floor plan of which you don’t know, fully aware that the householder is almost certainly well provided with weapons, large dogs, strong and active servants—would you want to do that?—and for what? A sackful of small, portable artworks, for which you’ll probably get ten groschen on the kreutzer. To which add a calm, deliberate mind, resourcefulness, a steady hand, a delicate touch, the ability to work quickly and methodically. And that’s just for your scum-of-the-earth, back-alley burglar. Take the truly dreadful, evil men of history, slaughters of nations in the name of some twisted idea. Of necessity you must allow them to have had Faith (which moves mountains and without which mere works are in vain) and Hope, Loyalty, and Self-Sacrifice in the Name of the Cause, and practically every other noble and glorious characteristic you can possibly think of, except for the small matter of being in the right…

The Savior came and is coming again, but our healing is in his hands, not our own. If our Savior chose to enter the human story in a human body, then we should enter one another’s places of suffering remembering we carry and extend the presence of Christ. Sin is any Christian’s response to pain, poverty, and weakness that assumes they are individual problems to solve rather than places to patiently embody the solidarity of Jesus. When we reduce pain to an individual problem, we don’t know what to do with ourselves and our stories. In an increasingly individualistic society, where the space between self, tradition, and our embodied connection to each other feels wide, suffering can be a massive assault to our sense of self and our ability to hope. We become lost in a chasm of overspiritualized pain and undervalued physicality, not knowing where our lives fit alongside a Christianity glittering with the veneer of abundance. Already exhausted, we sink under the weight of existing as an aberration of the abundant life our Christian friends and families want us to project. Defeated and lonely, many of us subconsciously attempt to detach from the grief in our bodies, excising it from our minds to feel accepted in the community of the able and successful. We push pain away with effort, pretending to be okay among the shiny, smiling faces at church or work. For if we were honest about how sad or sick or hopeless we really feel, would we be accepted at all?

Okay,let's do it," Robbie said, slapping his hands together as he stood. He stepped towards me with his arms outstreched and I tripped back. " What? No" " What? Yes," he said. He hit the rewind button and the tape zipped backward. He paused it right as the dance began. " You don't really expect me to ask Tama to dance with me without any practice. Even I'm not that stupid." I was suddenly very aware of my heartbeat. " There's no way I'm dancing with you." " You really know how to stroke a guy's ego," Robbie joked. "Come on. I'm not that repulsive." "You're not repulsive at all, it's just-" " Well, that's good to hear," Robbie said with a teasing smile. He was enjoying this. "it's just that I don't dance," I admitted. Never had. Not once. Not with a guy. I was a dance free-zone. " Well, neither do II mean, except on stage. But i've never danced like this, so we're even" he said. He hit "play". The music started and Robbie pulled me toward him by my wrist. he grabbed my hand, which was sweating, and held it, then put his other hand on my waist. My boobs pressed sgsinst his chest and I flinched, but Robbie didn't seem to notice. He was too busy consulting the TV screen. " Here goes nothing," he said. "Okay, it's a waltz, so one, two, three,,, one, two, three. Looks like a big step on one and two little steps on two and three. Got it?" "Sure." I so didn't have it. " Okay, go." He started to step in a circle, pulling me with him.I staggered along, mortified. " One, two, three. One two, three," he counted under his breath. My foot caught on his ankle. " Oops! Sorry." I was sweating like mad now, wishing I'd taken off my sweater, at least. " I got ya," he said, his grip tightiening on my hand. " K eep going." " One, two, three," I counted, staring down at our feet. He slammed one of his hip into one of the set chairs. " Ow. Dammit!" " Are you okay?"I asked."Yeah. Keep going," he said through his teeth. " One, two, three," I counted. I glanced up at the Tv screen, and the second I took my eyes off our feet, they got hopelessly tangled. I felt that instant swoop of gravity and shouted as we went down. The floor was not soft. " Oof?" " Ow. Okay, ow," Robbie said, grabbing his elbow. " That was not a good bone to fall on." He shook his arm out and I brought my knees up under my chin. " Maybe this wasn't the best idea." "No! No. We cannot give up that easily," Robbie said, standing. He took my hands and hoisted my up. " Maybe we just need to simplify it a little. " Actually i think its the twirl and the dip at the end that are really important," I theorized. It seemed like the most romantic part to me. " Okay, good." Robbie was phsyched by this development. "So maybe instead of going in circles, we just step side to side and do the twirl thing a couple of times. " Sounds like a plan," I said. " Let's do it." Robbie rewound the tape and we started from the beginning of the music. He took my hand again and held it up, then placed his other hand on my waist. This time we simply swayed back and forth. I was just getting used to the motion, when I realized that Robbie was staring at me.Big time." What?" i said, my skin prickling. " Trying to make eye contact," he said. " I hear eye contact while dancing is key." " Where would you hear something like that?" I said. " My grandmother. She's a wise woman," he said. His grandmother. How cute was that? His eyes were completely focused on my face. I tried to stare back into them, but I keep cracking up laughing. And he thought I'd make a good actress. " Wow. You suck at eye contact," he said. "Come on. Give me something to work here." I took a deep breath and steeled myself. It's just Robbie Delano, KJ. You can do this. And so I did. I looked right back into his eyes. And we continued to sway at to the music. His hand around mine. His hand on my waist. Our chests pressed together. I stared into his eyes, and soon i found that laughing was the last thing on my mind. " How's this working for you?

Granted, I told Her, that your grand design is undoubtedly something very nasty and bad, eventually, in the long term. But you're immortal and I'm not, so if I stop you now, you'll just wait till I'm dead and start all over again, so really, what's the point in me interfering?

The old, the crippled, the children, everyone with their worldly goods on their backs, we’ll all have to fend for ourselves when our own soldiers flood the Marsh, but sheep are valuable. Look, nobody gives a damn for the Marsh except Marshmen. The government and the King don’t care if we starve. They put on the blockade but charge their rents and taxes same as ever, and they’ll let the sea or the French take us if that preserves their skins for another day. So we look after ourselves. And that means trading, and selling wool—some of it wool off the sheep that are going to be saved when old women and children will be left behind, acause if you think those landowners have given up their income for the sake of the war, you’re joking. They want their wool sold, just like the Quality in London want to wear silk and drink brandy, and the merchants want their shelves stocked. We run goods for them, and when they catch us doing it, they hang us for the look of the thing.

All right, all right. But maybe it wouldn’t look that way to him. Maybe he sees what I see,” Robin said. “Someone clever and wonderful and loyal unto death who is worth defying the world for.” “Maybe he saw a nice pair of tits and got overexcited.

The touch of his hands, the wonder in his eyes, the astonishing sense of familiarity, as though he and Gareth had somehow slipped past one another all their lives and their meeting was long overdue.

God, I'm sorry, Joss. You have quite enough on your plate without me piling all this on you." "I've plenty. Only that plate's a trencher I share with my family and my people and most of the Marsh." He put a careful hand to Gareth's face. "Whereas with you, that's just for me." Gareth's lips rounded. "I...I would like to be just for you." That got into Joss's lungs like Marsh mist, making it oddly hard to breathe.

Peacock bowed and withdrew. Will said, “All right, how do I get a henchman? I want one.

Phoebe’s eyelids drooped. “How Victorian of you. I don’t intend to sit at home doing needlework, darling. It is 1924, after all.

All right, stop,” Kim said. “You needn’t break his arm.” Will couldn’t see why not. He put a bit more pressure on to make the point, waited for Chingford to stop shouting, leaned down, and said in his ear, “That was the last swing you ever take at him. Do it again and I’ll twist your head right off your neck.

You bloody did. You knew there was something up: you all but told him you knew what was going on. How?” “More fool him for believing a stranger’s meaningful statements,” Kim said. “It’s an old technique: tell someone you know what they did and watch the blush of their guilty conscience. You’ve heard that old story? Someone sends a telegram as a prank to White’s with no name, saying Fly, all is discovered, and six of the members leave the country?

Would you care to flee to the South of France at all? I know we discussed it a while ago, but it seems even more appealing now.” “Sounds good. In the meantime, shall we get incredibly drunk?” “Let’s.

All this time, she’d thought it meant something else, to do with fire in the blood and skin tingling at a certain touch, when really it was all about completely different things—food, shelter, comfort, money, a defensible space, something that would still be there in the morning. Stupid, she thought. It takes a valley full of dead bodies and a burned-out inn and her mother’s grave and a night with Axio and Senza Belot trashing and torching everything in his path to reveal the true definition of an everyday word. Simpler to have bought a dictionary.

For instance, I could have written this book in such a way that you’d like me and approve of all my choices, simply by twisting a few facts here and there and making people say things they didn’t, and you’d never know the difference.

Maybe Kim would, maybe he wouldn’t: Will could wait and see. In the meantime, he still had his right hand and someone to think about, plus a sense of exciting possibilities that he hadn’t felt in so long he’d almost forgotten what it was like. A fuck, a fight, a friendship: he’d take any or all.

The Iron Earl A Valor of Vinehill Novel A Regency Romance K.J. Jackson Copyright © K.J. Jackson, 2019 This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, Living or dead, is coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any forms, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author. First Edition: February 2019 ISBN: 978-1-940149-36-3 http

I opened a compartment in my mind, stuffed all of my feelings of regret and trepidation

Gareth leaned forward and Joss met his mouth. Kissing gently, for the first time today because it had all been too raw, kissing away too many hurts that had lasted too long. Kissing to seal a promise, and then just kissing because it was Gareth, and there was nowhere else Joss wanted to be and nothing else he wanted to do.

All his tangles were tugging tighter, and he couldn’t blame anyone but himself

All right, tell me about it." "Which part?" "All of it. Start with a shifty character walking into your bookshop last November. Not this one," he added, indicating Kim. "The other one.

Right. That.” Joss sat back, which more or less put him sitting on Gareth’s lap, arms round Gareth’s neck for balance. Gareth briefly considered throwing out all his chairs.

Stealing for a living is like falling off a roof. For a while, you sail along, exhilarated by the slipstream, free as a bird and twice as fast through the air, and then you hit something and it’s suddenly no good at all.

Gareth knew dependency all too well, and he saw it now: the ever-present fear of abandonment, the humiliation of being at another’s whim, the resentment that had to be stifled because to show it could be fatal.

You make it so easy," Hart whispered, because his throat was closing. "How is all this so easy for you?

I told you that you wouldn’t like me. I understand. It shows proper feeling. If you said to me: There’s this man who is so callous and brutal that he doesn’t give a damn about his fellow human beings, wouldn’t shed a tear over the death of an innocent; would you care to meet this person, shake hands with him, maybe invite him into your home and have dinner with him? You’re kidding, right. That hypothetical piece of shit is, of course, me. All my life—

So beautiful," he whispered. "Perfect. When you give yourself up to me." "All yours. Every bit.

I meant it.” Crane took his hand, long fingers curling around Stephen’s. “It was under duress, admittedly, in that I had no reason to believe that we were going to survive, but I meant it. All yours, Stephen. I do not want to be without you.

But (he explained to me, when I objected) what the people want is something that looks at first sight like real life, but which actually turns out to be a fairy tale with virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns. Also, I told him, what they want is something that looks new and completely original but is actually the same old story we've all known and loved since we were kids. Exactly, he said.

After all, we're the same in so many things, it's our differences that matter.

Love is a confidence trick, that's all. It's Nature's way of suckering a mammal with a brain and a long, vulnerable gestation period into reproducing. Humans can think, so ordinary animal-grade maternal instinct wouldn't be enough to make human women go through all that, not if they stopped and thought about what's involved. So you have love. It's a substitute for rational thought; look at it that way, it's the complete antithesis of what being human's all about. Humans can make choices, it's what makes them unique. Love takes all your choices away, and there you suddenly are. Worse still, love inevitably leads to the worst pain of all, when you lose the people you love.

I don't know what I'm doing. Nothing's gone like I thought it would since 1914. And all I can think about is you.

I don't know what I'm doing. nothing's gone like I thought it would since 1914. And all I can think about is you.

I – beg – your – pardon,’ the Duke said, and he put all the duke he had into each stony word.

Sir James’s expression was poisonous but he didn’t reply. Hartlebury waited a few seconds, then snorted. ‘Didn’t think so. Keep it that way. Spiteful prick,’ he added, not really under his breath at all. ‘Evening, Charnage. Not seen you in a while.

For what it was worth, she got the impression that Niessa liked her, or at least approved of her, in the same way a chess-player approves of one of his pieces when it stays where it’s been put and doesn’t go wandering off all over the board.

a shake. He was a problem, she couldn’t deny it. The infuriating man could unveil her activities without the slightest glance back over his shoulder. One who could destroy her plans—much too easily and much too quickly. Sure, she was an oddity; she knew that. But she should have been inconsequential to a man with his considerable status and power—a hiccup in his life. Maybe he had forgotten their whole little scene on the balcony by now. And with luck, the inconvenience she had caused him the previous night in the street fight would also soon leave his mind. With even more luck, she would find her father’s other murderers tonight, and be done with the whole affair before he exposed her escapades. “Aggie dear, are you all right? You look a bit flushed and preoccupied,” her aunt said, worry evident in her brow. “Does your headache bother you overly much?” Aggie forced a smile. “No, Aunt Bea, I am fine, just a little tired. You saw me earlier, and I could not get back to sleep today.” “Well, no surprise after the last year you

We are each born with a destiny,” the old woman finally said. “Yet we must also choose it for ourselves. Fate and free-will, they perform a dance, your whole life long. There is a constant tug of war between the two. Which side wins…well, that depends.” “Depends on what?” Kyra asked. “Your force of will. How desperately you want something—and how graced you are by God. And perhaps most of all, what you are willing to give up.” “I

Within every heart lives two dragons, a dragon of Hope and a dragon of Hate, both mighty and powerful in equal measure. They war constantly, always struggling for dominance to be the rightful ruler of your heart. You feed them with your actions. All that drives us in life is fuelled by either hope or hate. Hate is the dark mirror of hope, empowering our hearts with the same fire and energy but striving for different ends. Hate drives us to bring those above us to ruin, while hope exalts us to raise ourselves up beyond where we are. We want to better ourselves, or drag down someone else so we are on top. The

This is the curse of all those who bear great power. Each of us suffer our burdens, and those are stones we carry until we are dead. The greater our strength, the more weight life stacks on our backs.” I

Jesus, Pen, “I love you.” Mark sounded almost disbelieving. “You’re magical.” “I’m not,” Pen said. “I’m me, and you took the trouble to look. And I see you, Mr. Penny Plain Practical Man who ‘just gets on with things,’ pretending not to be the most wonderful man in the world. And I don’t care if nobody else sees that, any more than Greta does about Tim. I know, and that’s all that matters.” “God.” Mark pulled him round, resting his head against Pen’s. “I love you.

He had believed it was the way to hold on to the best part of them, believed in that moment of impact, right at the start - when their strangeness hit you, when you saw them clearly, when you took in all at once their shape, the way they stood, their hands, their skin, their eyes, when the air was full of them, when the world stopped for them, when if there were words the words would be, Hold it, hold it right there.

He had believed it was the way to hold on to the best part of them, believed in that moment of impact, right at the start - when their strangeness hit you, when you saw them clearly, when you took in all at once their shape, the way they stood, their hands, their skin, their eyes, when the air was full of them, when the world stopped for them, when if there were words the words would be, Hold it, hold it right there.

men seem to use the word witch more than women. That’s because men have more power than women, and any threat to that power becomes a source of fear. When any person, man or woman, has wealth and influence, it tends to ensure a comfortable living for them and their families, and they will lash out at anyone who might try to take it from them.’ ‘I don’t understand how a witch having power means a man will lose his wealth,’ I said. Mother chuckled appreciatively. ‘Precisely. If a woman is called a witch, and ostracised and forced out of all good society, then other women won’t be influenced by her. Well, that’s what the men and sometimes women, think. Men see women as their property. They think to own them, and their bodies, like a horse, or a cow. Witches are often herbalists or nature worshippers who make their own coin, using knowledge of the lands to brew potions and remedies. There was an instance where a witch was drowned after being accused of planting bitter herbs in a farmer’s field which ruined his crops. The post-mortem found her with child, and the wife admitted to knowing it belonged to her husband.’ ‘So he lied.’ ‘Yes, and then in his defence stated the witch had used a powerful love potion to make him give her a child.’ ‘And they believed him?’ I said in astonishment.  ‘Unless it can be proved different, a man’s word is often taken over a woman’s, especially if that woman has a poor reputation.’ ‘Can

We all have one thing in common, and that is we love our homes. To lose our home is a terrible thing that pains our hearts like the death of a close friend. Physically a home is nothing more than inanimate stone and wood and nails, but it is so much more when surrounded by friends, by family, and by all the things we love. I

Children, wyrmlings, little ones, younglings…in whatever tongue you call them, the meaning is still the same. They represent the future, the next generation, the continuation and growth of the species. Their importance goes beyond an individual merely passing along our genes. In a sense, they are everything a society must treasure and nurture if the society is to continue to exist in the future. The next generation is everything we fight for every single day, everything we work towards, everything we sacrifice and suffer for. They are us. Killing an adult is a terrible thing, yes, for this act robs a society of its present. To take the life of a child is to rob it of its future. It is a universal constant in almost all civilisations that to harm a child—physically, mentally, or sexually—is an abhorrent act punishable by the harshest

By all appearances, it’s a beautiful day. The sun shines down on us. Birds sing. I look up at the pristine blue sky. There’s not a cloud in it, but all I see is the storm. It’s ugly, and violent, and it’s creeping down on us slowly. Brady and I are together today to mourn our daughter, but what happens next? What happens when we’re done grieving? That’s when the storm will touch down like a tornado and try to destroy us. It’s inevitable. I only hope we’re strong enough to survive, because we’re definitely not prepared for it.

Ah well.” Gignomai turned slowly round. “It’s not often commented on, but when you stop and think, mercy is the biggest injustice of them all.

Time moves on, after all.  You have to move with it or let the current drown you.

After all, what is truth but the consensus of memories of reliable witnesses?

I just want you to open your eyes. Understand where I'm coming from. Understand that one bad choice isn't all there is to me.

She spun on him. “You’re just like every man out there,” she said, gesturing to the crowd. “You are all the same—all selfish, arrogant brutes!” She stalked to a dark corner, flung herself down, and buried her face in her hands, sobbing. I didn’t do a bloody thing, and somehow I feel like I just killed someone.

Whichever it was, he did not feel inclined to open his eyes to make the discovery. In truth, he did not feel inclined to move at all.

Darcy looked at her sister for a beat, deciding whether or not to tell her about her strange dream. Grace knew more than anyone about the dark secrets of Darcy’s life, but not even her sister knew it all. And Darcy wanted to keep it that way. “I

For ten days, all I’d had to wash in was the piss-pot, and the nearest water was the pump, five flights of narrow, winding steps down, and loneliness had been the least of my problems, if you count tiny things that bite as company. I’m not the most fastidious of men, but I don’t like it when I turn into the sort of creature I’d cross the street to avoid.

Well, you know what they say. Never be nice to an asshole; all you get is shit in return.

I shook my head. “Usually when there’s an invasion he goes and stays with his cousin the seed-merchant, just across the border,” I said. “I gather he prefers it there to here. The Mysians won’t bother you at all. Particularly if you buy their baskets.

I've learned from past mistakes that you should never own something as fun as a charcuterie board and save it for "special occasions," because it's highly like that the people you saved it for will somehow end up not having been worth it in the long run. Then, you'll just end up lamenting all the missed opportunities you had to enjoy the things all by yourself.

Hydrocodone is expensive. Off-market, a full baggie can set you back three hundred dollars. KJ’s dealer waited for the two women to overextend themselves, and then offered much cheaper avenues to chase the same high: powder and black tar heroin.

My own words betray the fact that I apparently believe in luck, at some visceral level. Luck would have to be some external agency powerful enough to control what happens; in which case, it meets the basic criteria for being God. In other regards, of course, it has little to do with the form that God conventionally takes. It doesn’t seem to worry about whether or not you’ve been good; nor does it give a damn if you pray to it. It’s there for a while, and then it goes away again. I think of it as the way everything in the house shakes when one of those heavy carts loaded with slate goes by on the way up from the quarries. The cart has its own agenda, which has nothing at all to do with me, but it makes my house shake, which affects me, so understandably and misguidedly I take it personally.

She shaded in more of the tornado, a little fiercely, then turned back a few pages and let herself be pulled into the world of Carleen, the least popular chicken in her high school, pecked down by plumper hens and scorned by cocky roosters. Carleen's story wasn't hers. Amanda had been quite well liked in high school---mostly because she stayed resolutely in the middle of the road, dressing like everyone else, doing the things everyone else did. Amanda had made those choices thanks to Mae, who had already made all the mistakes. Unlike Mae, Amanda did exactly what was expected of her and not anything more. She was a good girl. Carleen was not a good girl. She was the dark chicken of her small town, pulling the other chicks in with her schemes and plans when they were young, then finding herself alone as a teenage chicken with a lot to prove and only her mysterious telekinetic powers, powers the others in the flock didn't share, to do it with. Carleen had been thoroughly rejected and cruelly humiliated by her peers, and would continue to be until she allowed the forces within her to burst free---at prom, of course, in homage to Carrie, one of Amanda's favorite books---and annihilate the chickens around her in a rampage of oil and flames. Carleen, Amanda thought, would end her prom night with a fried chicken dinner.

Jay got up and walked to the trash to scrape off his plate, but when the trash can popped open, he stopped and reached in. Mae got cold inside. Shit. That was where she had put everything from her satisfying clear-out earlier in the day, and she hadn't covered up the things she was discarding with other trash, as she usually did. Damn it! She knew exactly what was coming. Jay stood up with a ratty stuffed chicken in his hand. "You can't throw this away. Ryder loves this." He did, but Mae hated it. The little stuffed chicken---a gift from her sister when Ryder was born---had grown gray and smelly and was beyond washing, and Mae had been able to slip it away from Ryder's bed for several nights running. With the trip, she figured he would forget about it, although she'd felt a tiny twinge of regret as she'd stuffed it into the trash can. It was just that it was so gross now, and there were so many stuffies. If she didn't get rid of them, they'd take over. "He doesn't care about it. Not really," she said. It sounded weak, even to her. "It's so filthy, Jay. He's little. He'll like other things. It's just junk, anyway." Jay turned on her. "You don't always get to decide what's junk, Mae. You don't get to pick and choose everything we have and everything we do and everywhere we go." "I don't. Just---some things. And it's not the same." Throwing away a toy was not the same as making all their life decisions---and how could she not make decisions right now, when everything Jay wanted to do felt so precarious? Couldn't he see that they wanted the same things, for the world to stay nice and safe and solid around Madison and Ryder and around themselves? She knew Jay had moved around a lot as a kid, and that at least once his dad had handed him a shoebox and told him if it didn't fit in there, it couldn't come. But sometimes you had to get rid of those things, even things you once loved, to make room for better things. And sometimes you made mistakes. Don't bring up the baseball glove. Don't bring up the baseball glove. She hadn't known the baseball glove was a perfectly worn-in classic Rawlings. Or that Jay had been hoping Madison or Ryder might use it someday. All she'd seen was that it was old. And kinda moldy. She honestly hadn't thought he would notice it was gone.

Mimi's and Frannie's both served fried chicken, yes. And they had the same kind of name. And they had been started by sisters. But from there, the similarities---and any competition---ended. Frannie's was open all day, with an extensive menu. Mimi's offered only dinner: chicken, biscuits, French fries, and salad, and off-the-menu doughnuts on Saturday mornings for those in the know. And of course pie, but only when the spirit moved her mother to bake.

That's the thing about belief, you can't make yourself do it. It's like falling asleep or being in love. You can lie there all night desperately wanting to go to sleep, and the more you want the more it doesn't happen. You can really, really want to believe, but if you don't you just don't.

Mercy isn't fair, it means someone getting away with what he did because the Boss feels sorry for him. Justice is fair. Justice puts people in prison. Mercy lets them out again. Of course mercy isn't fair. It's breaking all the rules.

Avarice, envy, pride: three fatal sparks have set the hearts of all on fire.

He’d been apprenticed to a joiner before the war, but that felt like decades ago: all he was good at now was killing people, which was discouraged.

The Cataboeans are all right. They believe some truly weird stuff. They believe that they’re the only people on earth, and all the other anthropoid entities they meet are the spirits of the dead.

Stephen,” said Crane thickly. Stephen was back at his side in two steps. “What?” “I can’t move.” Stephen’s chest contracted. “Can’t move at all? Try and take a step forward.” “I can’t.

Such an easy thing, to be liked. All you had to do was make sure people didn't know you.

Silence can soothe us and silence can scar us. I was raised for reverence, to sit still and silent in church, and to give people in leadership, especially men, unquestioning respect and honor for their God-given authority. I learned to raise my voice when grace amazed me, but relegate it into silence when harm alarmed me. Silence is the arbiter of scarcity, the force of coercion and control that those who hold the most power wield to maintain the status quo. If power can only be held in the hands of a few, then pleasing them is what buys us belonging. So we learn to fold our hands and cross our legs and put a smile across our faces to hide our heart’s frown, all the while absorbing the bad, bad news that God is actually a power who must be pleased and love is just a reality we receive when we are good enough. I was taught reverence for the sound of a preacher’s voice and the pages of my Bible, but I was never taught to reverence the sounds of my own body and soul. – KJ Ramsey

Ladies from fine old Imperial families shouldn’t sleep in tents and shit in ditches. Exactly what they were supposed to do all day nobody had quite figured out yet; be put away in cupboards when not in use seemed to be the prevailing opinion.

Properly speaking, since my business in town had finished, I should have gone back to Corps headquarters and got on with my paperwork. Somehow, though, I felt that would be a bad idea. It’s inconceivable that the general, or the admiral or the Chamberlain or one of the divisional chiefs, or one of their many, many staff, would arrange for a serving officer of the empire to be murdered as he rode home alone along the lonely roads across the moors. But even in an empire as well ordered as ours, there are bandits, discharged soldiers, runaway slaves, disaffected serfs, religious zealots and ordinary loons, all manner of bad people who’d cut your throat for the nails in your boots, and from time to time officers who’d made nuisances of themselves had fallen foul of them, and other hazards of long-distance travel.

The way I see it, the truth is just barren moorland, all useless bog and heather. It’s only when you break it up and turn it over with the ploughshare of the Good Lie that you can screw a livelihood out of it. Isn’t that what humans do? They take a dead landscape and reshape it into what they need, and want, and can use.

You look – at least, I do, or I did – at the emperor and the nobility, lording it over the people while they starve and suffer, and you say to yourself, something’s got to be done about all this. This can’t be right. The lions of the earth must not destroy the worms any more. And then you do something about it, and what do you discover? The people turn out to be – well, people; a collective noun for all those individual men and women, none of them perfect, some of them downright vicious, most of them monumentally stupid. As stupid as the emperor, the great hereditary lords, the priestly hierarchs, the General Staff and the Lords of the Admiralty, the merchant princes and the organised crime barons. When push comes to shove, thick as bricks, the lot of them. You wouldn’t trust any of them with the helm of a ship, or the regimental welfare fund, or your dog if you were going away for a few days, or anything sharp.

He had the build of a thug, or a boxer, but he walked lightly, and took the chair to which she waved him without taking up all the room around it.

All the memories, the knowledge, the perceptions, the experiences stored inside a mans head, all wasted in the time it takes a man’s heart to stop beating. It was the waste that appalled him. What a ridiculous way to organise things, he said, a man spends his whole life learning, acquiring information, both on his own and as part of a collective. Just when he’s starting to get somewhere, the buckets tipped out and all the good stuff is poured out onto the ground. He had a lot to say about that. He said that of all the evils in the world, of which there were rather too many for his liking, the greatest evil of all was love. It’s sheer spitefulness to allow mortals to love, because everyone dies, but the love they cause to be in others doesn’t die with them. Therefore love is the cause of the greatest sorrow, therefore love is the greatest evil.

All the memories, the knowledge, the perceptions, the experiences stored inside a mans head, all wasted in the time it takes a man’s heart to stop beating. It was the waste that appalled him. What a ridiculous way to organise things, he said, a man spends his whole life learning, acquiring information, both on his own and as part of a collective. Just when he’s starting to get somewhere, the buckets tipped out and all the good stuff is poured out onto the ground. He had a lot to say about that. He said that of all the evils in the world, of which there were rather too many for his liking, the greatest evil of all was love. It’s sheer spitefulness to allow mortals to love, because everyone dies, but the love they cause to be in others doesn’t die with them. Therefore love is the cause of the greatest sorrow, therefore love is the greatest evil.

Time moves on, after all. You have to move with it or let the current drown you.

Guy stared at the words. “Broken leg,” he repeated. His voice sounded odd. “I fear so, sir,” the servant said. “Sir Philip and Mr. Raven found Miss Frisby in a field, I understand.” “But—is she all right?” “No, sir. Her leg is broken.

She wondered where Oida was, and what he was doing. Somehow, things would be different if he was there; he’d have books, and nice things to eat, and a comfortable coach to ride in and take them somewhere with a roof and clean sheets and a warm fire. Suddenly she saw him as a man in armour, impervious to spears and arrows inside his cap-a-pie of money, charm, success and taste. The whole world could come crashing down, but he’d still have brought her something to read, and figs preserved in honey. It was then that she understood. It was just a matter of semantics, that was all. Like someone who’s learning a foreign language, she’d failed to grasp the true meaning of love. All this time, she’d thought it meant something else, to do with fire in the blood and skin tingling at a certain touch, when really it was all about completely different things—food, shelter, comfort, money, a defensible space, something that would still be there in the morning. Stupid, she thought. It takes a valley full of dead bodies and a burned-out inn and her mother’s grave and a night with Axio and Senza Belot trashing and torching everything in his path to reveal the true definition of an everyday word. Simpler to have bought a dictionary.

All through our lives, there are witnesses - parents, family, friends, people we work with, people we love and who love us, people who hate us and we hate. One by one they die, until the world seems empty, and eventually there are no independent witnesses to testify our crimes and our achievements. Only we remember them, there's nobody to contradict our version. If we want it to be, it can be the truth.

Father duly appeared, took his seat without looking in Gignomai’s direction, put down the book he’d been reading at breakfast, picked up another, lying open and face down on the desk. Gignomai couldn’t help glancing at him from time to time. All those words, he thought, all that information; it was like pouring water into sand. It all went in, through the eyes into the brain, and none of it ever came out again. Father’s head was a slurry-pit into which the sum of human knowledge and experience drained away, and all that richness, too much of it, poisoned the ground so that nothing would grow there ever again. He shuddered slightly.

I think that’s all the facts I can remember. If you like we can talk a bit more about metaphysics, or I can tell you some stories about my life as a soldier; you could go back and check the references, to give you an idea of the quality of my memory and powers of observation. I’d rather not, though, since you might use them to work out who I could be; somebody important who was at the same battles as I was. Purely by coincidence, you understand.

I want to call on people with mental disorders to challenge the status quo and speak up about all the things that contaminate your lives. Accept that mental illness is a part of you (not a defining part), a part of you that you don’t have to hide. Embrace it. Don’t be ashamed that your reality looks different from those of others. Remember, regardless of your gender, age, race, religion, work title, or any other sociodemographic determinant, it’s okay to have a meltdown, crumble, crack, and shatter into a million pieces. You are only human. You are well within your rights to express the true extent of the things you are experiencing. Don’t cover up parts of yourself you think are socially undesirable or culturally inappropriate. Own each and every inch of your being; the good, the bad, and the ugly. Be unapologetically you. Let the judgers judge you, let the haters hate you, let the critics critique you, but let no one silence you. Let us help normalize mental health discussions.

Honestly, I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel like anymore. There are days I feel sluggish and demotivated, as though someone has put my thoughts and feelings into a blender; an inexplicable mixture of boredom, irritation, frustration, and confusion. I can’t pinpoint what I’m experiencing, never mind the ‘why’ behind it. Thus, sometimes it’s hard to communicate a description of my state of being, as the origin of the feeling is often a mystery. It’s like going backward on a rollercoaster ride of emotions, without any anticipation of what is to come. I guess that is what makes it hard for other people to comprehend my feelings, thoughts, and actions and I sometimes become annoyed at well-meaning enquiries about my mood, which I’m at a loss to answer. After all, how are people going to understand what I don’t understand myself?

I could use various words to describe depression: brutal, unrelenting, gruesome, terrifying, exhausting, and demanding, but all these words would be an understatement to describe its sheer intensity and unforgiving nature.

The existence of depression and other mental health conditions should not be nullified because of mental illness denialists, naysayers, and trolls. I may not walk around battered, bruised, and broken with my arm in a cast, with my neck in a brace, or my leg all wrapped up; but that does not indicate the absence of hurt or suffering. It may be invisible, incomprehensible, or even imaginary to some, but depression is just as real as cancer, diabetes, and any other illness. I have been diagnosed with it, so have millions of other people around the globe, and I’m not ashamed of it. What I’m ashamed of is ignorant people; people who obnoxiously belittle or invalidate other people’s experiences.

My message to the ignorant is that we need to abolish all ancient, traditional, and unhelpful mental health beliefs that stem from the media, movies, cultural influences, religion, or gender stereotypes. Beliefs where mental illness in itself is negatively portrayed, as well as the treatment thereof, like going to a psychologist, being admitted to a psychiatric facility, and taking medication. It’s perfectly okay for people from any culture, religious group, gender, or any walk of life to receive mental health treatment. It’s not disgraceful, weakness in character or faith, or taboo.

At the time, each time round, I thought I was doing the right thing – no, I was doing the right thing. At every turn, all I wanted was to be a good man, honourable, putting others ahead of myself. And this is where I’ve brought you all to, by doing the right thing. I guess that’s the way it’s got to be, with me. Everything I do turns bad on me, and I’ve never knowingly done anything wrong, in the small part of my life that I can remember.

Well." Dora put the tray down. "I knew as you two was running from summat when you came her wi' no luggage nor a hat to your heads. I thought I knew what that trouble was. Suppose I was wrong." "Suppose you were," Jonah said, wearily. "Not that wrong." Ben would not deny Jonah now. "There's just...more to it." "I see that." Dora folder her arms. "How much trouble are you in?" "All of it," Jonah said.

Sadly, Crane knew he was right; humans were their own worst enemy. Negative news always spreads further and faster than positive news, and as with all businesses, journalism provides a service based on supply and demand. The more people click and share negativity, the more journalists are happy to pump it out for us all to consume.

Because I don't know what we're going to do, Jem, singly or together. I don't like any of the courses of action that seem right, and all the options I'd prefer to take seem wrong.

Guy. I suspect I have been falling in love with you since you came through my doors, terrified of everything and still fighting for your sister. You’ve given me your trust and your innocence and your body, and if I had any sense at all I would have spent the last week telling you I adore you, instead of trying not to face up to the consequences

My money or my life?” He smiled into Toby’s glorious, glowing eyes. “Sweetheart, you can have all you want of both.

Gareth had no idea why Joss wanted him, of all men, but by some miracle he did, and Gareth Inglis was, at this moment, the luckiest man on Romney Marsh. Possibly in England.