The Saucy Wenches Book Club

“A boring truth will always have difficulty competing with an exciting lie.” ~ Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

I recognized winter. I saw it coming (a mile off, since you ask), and I looked it in the eye. I greeted it and let it in. I had some tricks up my sleeve, you see. I’ve learned them the hard way. When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favored child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: “What is this winter all about?” I asked myself: “What change is coming?” ~ Katherine May, Wintering

On the one occasion that a vendor was brave enough to ask why he was roaring into his luggage, Warren gaily replied, “Because that’s where the dragon is!” ~ Josiah Bancroft, The Hexologists

We never thought of ourselves as witches, my mother and I. For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those who speak it, not those it describes. ~ Emilia Hart, Weyward

“I almost tell her that fun doesn’t equate to happiness; at the very least, it lends you happiness and I want to know how to keep it.” ~ Jessica George, Maame

“We don’t get to choose which battles we’re born into,” she says. “The only thing we get is to choose what we’ll do. Will we join the fight? Or will we turn our backs?” ~ Nick Fuller Googins, The Great Transition

“They will call you hysterical no matter how much dignity you have. So you might as well do whatever the hell you want.” ~ Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“I’d watched a lot of humans watch or read all kinds of media, so I knew that when they didn’t talk and didn’t move much except to eat crunchy things out of bags, it was a good sign.” ~ Martha Wells, System Collapse ( The Murderbot Diaries #7)

“...I’m here on an island in the Caribbean, being told I need to talk to the dolphins in the middle of a labor action about some whales that might have torpedoes, armed by a secret society of villains who want access to a storeroom full of objects probably looted from the victims of the friggin’ Nazis and who are maybe willing to blow up my volcano lair to get it.” ~ John Scalzi, Starter Villain

“All I understand for sure is that people have a very strong need to explain the world in ways that make them feel better, or safer, or more powerful, or more well liked, or more in control, but not necessarily in ways that are true. Alas, the truth is of very low importance, psychologically speaking.” ~ Nathan Hill, Wellness

“Write me a story where there is no ending, Kitt. Write to me and fill my empty spaces.” ~ Rebecca Ross, Ruthless Vows

“The job of an officer is to ensure the proper removal of obstructive dream matter ... A dream officer packages elements of the dream for safe disposal. Once those elements are packaged, the worker’s performance should improve, thus fulfilling our contractual obligation.” ~ Molly McGhee, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind

Enchantment came so easily to me as a child ... Now I wonder how I can find it again. It turns out that it had nothing to do with beauty after all ... I think instead that when I was young, it came from a deep engagement with the world around me, the particular quality of experience that accompanies close attention, the sense of contact that emerges from noticing. ~ Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“It’s almost a century since the last one, and in that century, every vice of the Empire has been repeated in the Foundation. Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law: no change. Despotism! They know one rule: force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is theirs.” ~ Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire ( Foundation  #2)

“When I told you,” Hugo said, biting off the end of each word, “to start plotting again, I meant in your books.” And there came that laugh again, the-devil’s-at-the-back-door-and-nobody-remembered-to-lock-it laugh. “You know what they say, my boy ... be careful what you wish for.” ~ Meg Shaffer, The Wishing Game

I woke to fields so white, so smooth, that it is impossible to look upon them and not recall, in certain swells and swales, the alabaster curves of those most immodest Venuses. Only a matter of time before our reformers start preaching the dangers of the untouched snowfield. ~ Daniel Mason, North Woods

“They have vegan cheese.” “No, they don’t. They have shredded orange and white sadness that mocks cheese and everything it stands for.” ~ John Scalzi, The Kaiju Preservation Society

Even now, with the natural world in so much trouble—even now, with the patterns of my daily life changing in ways I don’t always welcome or understand—radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world. I mean to keep looking every single day until I find them. ~ Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year