The Saucy Wenches Book Club

Romance wasn’t in chocolate, it was in the gasp of breath as we came up for air. It was in the way he cradled my face, the way I traced my finger over the crescent-shaped birthmark on his collarbone. It was in the way he uttered how beautiful I was, the way it made my heart soar. It was in the way I wanted to know everything about him — his favorite songs, finally guess his favorite color. ~ Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“We are allowed to do that, are we not Mabel? To invent our own endings and choose joy over sorrow?” ~ Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery. ~ Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Nobody will ever fuck you the way I’m about to fuck you, Saeris Fane. I’m about to introduce you to all seven gods. When you meet them, don’t forget to tell them I’m the one you worship on your knees.” ~ Callie Hart, Quicksilver

“Gather as much knowledge as you can, because information is power. And choosing how to use it is freedom. The more you know, the freer you will be.” ~ Kirsten Miller, Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books

“Here’s an idea: All emotions start out as love. Later, that love is worked on by the forces of luck and suffering. Hate is just soured love. Fear is wounded love. Longing is homeless love. Love, not pain, is the mother. Love is the taproot.” ~ Amity Gaige, Heartwood

“All of the hormones that made me want to seem approachable so I could breed are gone and replaced by hormones that are fiercely protective of my autonomy and freedom” ~ Miranda July, All Fours

“If it is a metaphor, then what is it a metaphor of?” she asked. “I believe it is of the persistence of the miraculous in our lives,” Bardfield-Saling said. “The moon turning to cheese is a miracle, is it not?” ~ John Scalzi, When the Moon Hits Your Eye

“Leave those dishes,” I should have said. “Come play with me in the forest,” I should have said. “The world will end tomorrow.” ~ Emma Pattee, Tilt

“Maybe we’ll drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we’ll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other.” ~ Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“I refuse to ‘look up.’ Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man’s fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.” “I ain’t miserable.” “You are.” “No, I ain’t.” “Yes, you are.” ~ John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“No, he’s made a very good point,” said Bashford provocatively. “Women are just vessels, you know.” “That’s very true,” said Sykes, smiling angelically at him. “I myself am a seventeen-thousand-ton Dreadnought class battleship with enough firepower to destroy a medium-sized city.” ~ Jodi Taylor, An Argumentation of Historians

The octopuses do not produce representational art of living things, for to live is to change and be in constant motion. ... They create abstract sculpture..., they make poetry with their skins, they dance through strange, boneless ballets in the water. To the octopuses this is not distinct from living. ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“Don’t choose a mediocre life for a mediocre man. Go be exceptional. If he’s worth it, he won’t judge you. And if he’s really the one, he’ll come along for the ride.” ~ Penn Cole, Spark of the Everflame

“Celie, baby, you look around at people who are happy in themselves in their lives — they’re just busy living, having a good time. They don’t set out to be mean to other people. Their energy is going into other things. It doesn’t even occur to them to hurt someone else, or to try to make them feel small. In fact, they’re more likely to be building other people up.” ~ Jojo Moyes, We All Live Here

When a dog chooses to love a human, it is a timeless affair of the soul and spirit, a meeting far beyond the mortal body. An eternal entanglement is this mingling of the souls. A loyalty beyond language and all of life’s earthly matter. ~ Kira Jane Buxton, Tartufo

“Listen. I need you to tell people this; I need you, when you get back, to tell them: the brutality is terrible. And yes: the chaos is very great. But tell them: greater than the world’s chaos are its miracles.” ~ Katherine Rundell, Impossible Creatures

Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need. ~ Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

We must become a spiritual partner of science, using our vast experience—millennia of philosophy, personal inquiry, meditation, soul-searching—to help humanity build a moral framework and ensure that the coming technologies will unify, illuminate, and raise us up ... rather than destroy us. ~ Dan Brown, Origin

Human beings, Adina faxes, did not think their lives were challenging enough so they invented roller coasters. A roller coaster is a series of problems on a steel track. Upon encountering real problems, human beings compare their lives to riding a roller coaster, even though they invented roller coasters to be fun things to do on their days off. ~ Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland

They would think she was savoring the taste (blueberries, cinnamon, cream — excellent), but she was actually savoring the whole morning, trying to catch it, pin it down, keep it safe before all those precious moments became yet another memory. ~ Liane Moriarty, What Alice Forgot

“It’s hard.” “What is?” “Being alive.” “It is,” Arthur agreed. “But perhaps that’s the point: the trials and tribulations of life weigh heavily upon us, but we find people to help lighten the load.” ~ T.J. Klune, Somewhere Beyond the Sea

The ships saved a million lives, but when the tycoon died his heirs reconsidered this legacy. They formed a partnership with a shrewd pharmaceutical astronaut and began developing therapies they identified as “crucial to an orderly future.” ~ Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” ~ Carley Fortune, This Summer Will Be Different

Reading a novel was like returning to a once-beloved holiday destination. ~ Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

People do not get “heavy” with wisdom. They get light. The wiser you become, the lighter you become. This is an unsolicited testimonial for lightheartedness... ~ Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

“So I preached from Luke, chapter eighteen, verses one through eight: the parable of the importunate widow. It’s one I’ve always liked. A widow is so persistent in her demands for justice that she overcomes the resistance of a judge who fears neither God nor man. She wears him down. Moral: The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist. Persisting isn’t always safe, but it’s often necessary.” ~ Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Come out and fight like your balls didn’t rot off decades ago!” ~ Danielle L. Jensen, A Fate Inked in Blood

She could not fathom the hexagonal miracle of snowflakes formed from clouds, crystallized fern and feather that tumble down to light on a coat sleeve, white stars melting even as they strike. How did such force and beauty come to be in something so small and fleeting and unknowable? You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact Mabel had come to suspect the opposite. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were able before it slipped like water between your fingers. ~ Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child

There was something just so reassuring about books. They had beginnings and middles and ends, and if you didn’t like a part, you could skip to the next chapter. If someone died, you could stop on the last page before, and they’d live on forever. Happy endings were definite, evils defeated, and the good lasted forever. ~ Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“That is why great power must never reside in only one person. It must be shared.” Her rough voice was rougher than before. “It must be spread, among as many good women and men as can be found; not because it is kind or polite or fair, but because it is the only way to beat back against horror.” ~ Katherine Rundell, Impossible Creatures

“Your wings won’t hold the weight of this ice,” Andarna blatantly mocks him. “And yet yours miraculously carry the burden of your ego.” “Go find a sheep and let the adults work.” ~ Rebecca Yarros, Onyx Storm

On this autumn morning, the piazza is empty but for one being. A cat—best described as a cross between a crumpled tuxedo and a well-used toilet wand—sits vigilant. Seven unplanned litters of kittens have tested her patience and her personality, so that she has matured into the kind of cat that will take a crap on the carpet before she takes crap from anyone else. ... And she realizes something is coming. Something snarky. Sensual. A gambit. A quiet riot. The cat purrs in anticipation of anarchy. ~ Kira Jane Buxton, Tartufo

“Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age ... Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books ... I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he’s found himself.” ~ John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

And for the first time in her life, as she walked through that sea of death ... she might have lifted her chin a bit higher. Might have felt a mantle settle on her shoulders, a train of starlight in her wake. Might have felt something like a crown settle upon her head. Guiding her into the dark. ~ Sarah J. Maas, House of Flame and Shadow

“It was funny, she thought, how many relationships one could have with the same man, over the course of a lifetime together.” ~ Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

Do not tread that perilous, emotional path, Ms. Grey. Each of us is flawed. None of us are spared. To obsess over our flaws defies, and undermines, the very purpose of our existence. If you see only bad when you look within, you render yourself incapable of bringing good into the world. ~ Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you ; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net — what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?” ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves. ~ Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

“New things are scary.” “They don’t have to be.” “How are they not?” “Because some of my favorite things I haven’t even done yet.” ~ Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

There is much that men could learn from nature if we would only listen. ~ Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River

She is so good at predicting what will happen in books, so bad at predicting what will happen in life. That is why she has always preferred books — because to be alive is so much harder. ~ Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“Cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science fiction novels. The company-city subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped ‘the company.’ I’ve never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that’s the way it will be. That’s the way it always is.” ~ Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

She appeared to have jumped out of the frying pan of sexism and into the fire of ageism. The final frontier of isms. ~ Clare Pooley, How to Age Disgracefully

In winter, I want concepts to chew over in a pool of lamplight—slow, spiritual reading, a reinforcement of the soul. Winter is a time for libraries, the muffled quiet of bookstacks and the scent of old pages and dust. In winter, I can spend hours in silent pursuit of a half-understood concept or a detail of history. There is nowhere else to be, after all. ~ Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The first rule is that you don’t fall in love,” he said ... “There are other rules too, but that is the main one. No falling in love. No staying in love. No daydreaming of love. If you stick to this you will just about be okay.” ~ Matt Haig, How To Stop Time

By now I’d read enough to know what irony meant but not what a devious bastard it is. ~ Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

When it was time to decide the official food of movie-watching, human beings did not go for Fig Newtons or caramel, foods that are silent, but popcorn, the loudest sound on Earth. ~ Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland

“To the ones who don’t run with the popular crowd, the ones who get caught reading under their desks, the ones who feel like they never get invited, included, or represented. Get your leathers. We have dragons to ride.” ~ Rebecca Yarros, Onyx Storm

But Christopher didn’t have the words, then, to explain what, nonetheless, he knew: that sometimes, if you are among the very lucky, a spark of understanding cuts like lightning across the space between two people. It’s a defibrillator for the heart. And it toughens you. It nourishes you. And the word we’ve chosen for it (which is an insufficient word for being so abruptly upended in a new and finer place) is friendship! ~ Katherine Rundell, Impossible Creatures