The Saucy Wenches Book Club

“You want to throw me down. And I, prideful, disdainful, godless, want to drag you into the dirt with me.” ~ Rachel Gillig, The Knight and the Moth

“You’re supposed to yell fire , though. Because no one comes when you yell rape , didn’t you know that, Bunny?” ~ Mona Awad, Bunny

What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this. ~ Maggie O’Farrell, Land

You keep trying to divide us. Don’t you realize what you’ve created? We have been tempered in the fires of hell, and we are now past the point of being broken. Your downfall has already been written in the stars. You may hurt us. You may kill us all. But it’s not going to matter. ~ Matt Dinniman, A Parade of Horribles ( Dungeon Crawler Carl #8)

“I didn’t expect I’d be wishing there was alcohol on this mission as early as Day One, but here we are.” ~ Mason Coile (Andrew Pyper), Exiles

“True love doesn’t expire, Raeve. It clings to you like a weight, even when you’re drowning.” ~ Sarah A. Parker, The Ballad of Falling Dragons

“In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.” ~ John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

Power was the ability to destroy without needing to. To do it not out of necessity, but as an act of pure excess. ~ Ray Nayler, The Tusks of Extinction

Kissing George was like stepping inside a house I’d never seen but somehow knew was home. ~ Carley Fortune, Our Perfect Storm

If you give a girl a taste of fresh air and then take it away, she will grow fierce and wild to get that fresh air back again. ~ Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

I am not a snob. I just take books more seriously than other people and am bad at pretending otherwise. ~ Laurie Frankel, Enormous Wings

So blind we humans are — so blind. To each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark and thinking we have touched someone. And maybe we have... But mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another’s selves, including our own. Thinking all the while that we can see. ~ Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say

“Oh God! He said he was DTF...we thought that meant down to finance .” Tilly lets out a wallop of a laugh. “DTF...girl, that’s the acronym for down to fuck .” ~ Meghan Quinn, Rules for the Summer

“There comes a point in every marriage when a woman realizes that the man she married is a freak. This is inevitable. It cannot be avoided. The only real question in the matter is what type of freak your husband will be—meaning: if you are lucky, you will find out your husband is preternaturally into vintage children’s train sets, and you will not find out that your husband pays high school cheerleaders for sex. That is the best we homemakers can hope for in this life: a man whose freakishness is not unspeakably violent or technically illegal, and therefore is something we are able to bear.” ~ Caro Claire Burke, Yesteryear

The ocean was a magician, I saw that now. These waves, their rippling crests and troughs, were an illusory trick, a veneer for everything that existed beneath. I had glimpsed that other world, and the one I had been born into was transformed forever. ~ EJ Swift, The Coral Bones

It’s just that we’re destroying the planet for real and no one seems to give a shit — and then something bad happens to one of us, a human being, and it’s “earth-shattering”. ~ Eric Puchner, Dream State

“You are not replaceable,” he said, his hands trembling against her shoulders. “You are not required to make your death convenient. You are allowed to be important to people.” ~ SenLinYu, Alchemised

One afternoon, as I lay on my bed wallowing in self-pity, my mom handed me a thick fantasy book, and when I turned my nose up at it, she told me, “Maggie, you need to live in someone else’s head for a bit.” ~ Ilona Andrews, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me

“It turns out executing a deliberate, convincing distraction is a lot harder than being a distraction accidentally.” ~ Martha Wells, Platform Decay ( The Murderbot Diaries #8)

Believe the lie — trust the lie — it is the only thing you have. Stay in the cage and paint the walls. If you do not, then you must quit; but if you can delude yourself long enough, then your delusions might very well come true. ~ R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“When your mama is in heaven there is nothing to stop her from loving you – not a man, not a job, not whatever she wanted to be doing but she had kids instead. When the sun shines, you can feel that pure love on you. It tastes like sugarcane.” ~ Tayari Jones, Kin

“Even at my most fucked up I like to make sense. At least to myself. Don’t you?” ~ Mason Coile (Andrew Pyper), Exiles

We want women like us. Women who present as scary, but have good hearts. Women who know how to get shit done. Women who, despite our age, share a dirty little secret: we’re just getting started. ~ Maria Semple, Go Gentle

“One day we’ll see that our perception of being alone in the world was once humankind’s greatest shared delusion.” ~ Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets

...the immortal words that flowed forth from mission specialist Jack Vo’s mouth as he became the first human to set foot on this new planet were: What the fuck is that? ~ Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“They will not break me. Fuck them all. They will not break me. But I will break them. This is my promise to myself, to my friends, and to you, anyone who reads these words. I will break them all.”   Crawler Carl, 25th Edition of The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook ~ Matt Dinniman, The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook ( Dungeon Crawler Carl #3)

“Sometimes the story isn’t the one you came to write but the one that finds you instead.” ~ Cameron Crowe, The Uncool

The grief that must fill the world is incomprehensible. Our small dose felt as large as the sun, didn’t it? ~ Virginia Evans, The Correspondent: A Novel

She made me feel alive. She made me want to fight to keep living, to not let the monsters and the darkness win, because it was so much better being surrounded by her light. And if her penchant for taser play had taught me anything, she could more than put me in my place if necessary. She was my match, my queen, and I would spend the rest of my life worshipping her like one if she let me. ~ Navessa Allen, Caught Up

“Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro , his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.” ~ Tony Hillerman, The Ghostway

The varieties of silence are as numerous as those of speech or thought. Or of listening. ~ Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

... It’s about learning to live in partnership with one another in small communities, and at the same time, working out a sustainable partnership with our environment. It’s about treating education and adaptability as the absolute essentials that they are. ~ Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Bless your heart,” I said. “And that means?” Solentine raised his eyebrows. “ Eat dirt and die. I should’ve let Krasta slice up your arm. You’re an insufferable ass.” ~ Ilona Andrews, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me

From beyond the grave, her mother had told her that women should not be men’s servants. They should stand alongside men as intellectual equals. And yet, somehow, she has found herself in thrall to a man who reduces her. He encourages her to think and read and write, but only in a way that agrees with his thoughts, that doesn’t question his ideas. ~ Caroline Lea, Love, Sex, and Frankenstein

“I think it’s the only form of hope we have. For our survival, I mean. What good is any other virtue without love? “In literature love is a weakness. Othello is easily manipulated by Iago because of his love for Desdemona. Anna Karenina throws herself under a train. Othello places his trust in Iago, not Desdemona. Anna Karenina’s society does not allow her to be with Vronsky. “Love is not the weakness. People get in its way. People are weak and perilous, not love.” ~ Lily King, Heart the Lover

But there are no new thoughts. They’re just old thoughts born into new moments – and in these moments is the thought: without that earth we are all finished. We couldn’t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea. ~ Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“My brothers have my measure when it comes to fighting and dancing and thinking and reading books, but none of them is half my equal at lying insensible in the mud.” ~ George R.R. Martin, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

“We’re supposed to be partners. But you seem to think everyone in your life is a fucking tool. And either they work or they don’t. Either they do what you want them to, or they’re useless.” ~ Lily Brooks-Dalton, Ruins

“But courage and training yourself not to feel are two different things.” ~ Mason Coile (Andrew Pyper), Exiles

Nature is waiting for us to learn that we are all bound by the same rules. And to remember that, when the forest breathes out, we breathe in. When the forest thrives, we thrive. When the forest lives, we live. ~ Suzanne Simard, When the Forest Breathes

“My roommate is a 240-pound homicidal hermit. For dinner he’s fixing me a dead fox he scraped off the highway near Ponchatoula, and after that we’re taking a leaky tin boat out on a windy lake to spy on some [redacted] fishermen. Don’t you wish you were here?” RJ Decker ~ Carl Hiaasen, Double Whammy

“You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.” ~ Ursula K. Leguin, The Dispossessed

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. ~ George Orwell, 1984

I knew this was all a construction. But it was so easy to get caught up in the story. So easy to forget who the true enemy was. ~ Matt Dinniman, The Gate of the Feral Gods ( Dungeon Crawler Carl #4)

I was forbidden to join the protest. We made a placard anyway, Gran let me put it up in her front window. I wanted the slogan I’ll be less activist when you’re less shit . We settled on I’ll do my homework when you do yours . ~ EJ Swift, When There Are Wolves Again

All libraries contained magic. Even libraries that didn’t specialize in such things. Because what was a book, if not a portal into another realm, another time, another life even. ~ Callie Hart, Brimstone

Everything alive is sentient. To accept this feels not at all like a humiliation of our species, but it is a humbling of sorts. And a precious gift—the kinship of all these sentient others an antidote to our loneliness. ~ Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

... A feeling that something is coming, waiting to be born, out of this time. Almost physical, like before a period, or a pregnancy, or vomiting. Something is getting ready to resolve itself. ~ Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

And yes, I will go into the year as you said: boldly, unapologetically, head up and not taking bullshit from anyone with a penis. ~ Virginia Evans, The Correspondent: A Novel

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves. ~ Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse