--Zel by Donna Jo Napoli
“I blanch. Zel will not be wed within the year. No. She must not leave me. This dress-to-be is perfect. Why has the cleark tainted my gift with her mundane talk of marriage? I am filled with elation at the thought of Zel’s beauty in this dress and dread at the thought that anyone other than me should appreciate that beauty. The contradictory emotions merge hatefully, indiscreetly, so that I cannot pick them apart.”
--Zel by Donna Jo Napoli
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“I still have no use for either; it seems to me that the combination of great beauty and great wealth is a monstrous cruel handicap for a girl who simply wants to tend to her own affairs and her own Geese. In the future I shall know precisely what to do if another old beggar woman comes pestering me for a bite to eat while I’m herding my Geese in the high meadow. Will I give her my last crust of bread, like the softhearted, simpleminded dunderpate that I am? No I will not; I’ll send her away with a flea in her ear, that’s what I’ll do. ‘Tis said that no good deed ever goes unpunished, and so I am learning to my sorrow.”
--Goose Girl by Patrice Kindl "He was said to have the body of a twenty-five year old, although no one knew where he kept it."
-- Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett "But aren't many gardens beautiful because they are imperfect?...Aren't the strange, new flowers that arise by mistake or misadventure as pleasing as the well-tended and planned?"
--The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray |