The Saucy Wenches Book Club

“I’ve lived my whole life with a land mind. Thinking land thoughts. But I want to think sea thoughts. I want to have a sea mind.” ~ Amity Gaige, Sea Wife

It’s not so much that the earth is one thing and the weather another, but that they’re the same. The earth is its air currents, the air currents the earth, just as a face is not separate from the expressions it makes. ~ Samantha Harvey, Orbital

Sometimes love manifests itself as a kind of amazed awe, as potent a feeling as any other form of connection: the shock of knowing that you are desired just as you are, no matter how broken you might feel. ~ Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

The world will try to make you small. It will tell you to be modest, and meek. But the world is wrong. You should get to feel and love and live as boldly as you want. ~ V.E. Schwab, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

She is a small animal in awe of the miracle of life. Embedded in a glorious network since birth, she has always been enough. An unbreakable sense of belonging rooting her in place. Hope wraps its tentacles around her and lifts her to the stars... ~ Kira Jane Buxton, Tartufo

For instance: consider the greatest riddle of all — what you should do with your one brief life? The answer is different for each person. There is no neat answer, though many have tried to offer one. There are no answers to being alive. There are only strong pieces of advice. ~ Katherine Rundell, Impossible Creatures

“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.” ~ Ursula K. Leguin, The Dispossessed

“Shadows can only be seen in the presence of light,” he told her, the words agonized. “I worry when you leave, there will be no one left to see me.” ~ Kaylie Smith, Enchantra

“They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.” ~ Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Beyond meeting simple immediate needs, the Navajo Way placed little worth on property. In fact, being richer than one’s clansmen carried with it a social stigma. It was unnatural, and therefore suspicious. ~ Tony Hillerman, The Blessing Way

“Do not be afraid of what you feel. Never forget what you have been through. Allow your passions to build inside you rather than diminish over time.” ~ Grady Hendrix, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

“So the plan wasn't a clusterfuck, it was just circling the clusterfuck target zone, getting ready to come in for a landing.” ~ Martha Wells, Exit Strategy ( The Murderbot Diaries #4)

“This is a choice between revolution against the power structures or our extermination by those structures. People like you and your family? You’re what they harvest. Everything you do, everything you buy, everything you believe in—that’s just product and profit for them. You’re their cash crop.” ~ Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“People like to think empathy means being able to imagine how you’d feel in a certain situation,” she said, head tilted, holding my gaze. “But it really doesn’t. It means being able to imagine how they’d feel, and how it might be completely different from you.” ~ Nicholas Binge, Ascension

If it is possible, as William Blake would have it, “to see a world in a grain of sand,” then perhaps we can see all nature in a hare: its simplicity and intricacy, fragility and glory, transience and beauty. ~ Chloe Dalton, Raising Hare

Then again, maybe love was always a gift. The only thing that couldn’t be bought or sold or bartered for. ~ Emily Henry, Great Big Beautiful Life

All she wanted to do was pull them off the shelves just to smell them. Crack open those perfect spines and devour the contents. She wanted to live and breathe a different world. Something, anything, other than her own horrid reality. It would be easy to spend a lifetime in this room and never read every volume. ~ K.A. Linde, The Wren in the Holly Library

In all of her time spent watching others, she hadn’t picked up on this part of falling in love, that someone could look at you as if you were the very center of everything. And even though you knew better, you’d allow yourself a moment to believe you were worthy of being revolved around, too. ~ Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“Did we really believe capitalism was exempt from the laws of nature? Did we really confuse endless consumption with endless progress? Benjamin DeCasseres, a Frenchman who lectured at Timbuk U., defined progress as ‘the victory of laughter over dogma.’ Now there’s a victory worth celebrating.” ~ Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas