From As We Fall Through Time, by Claire North:
The moment I saw my corpse, I knew that the probability of it ending up in Seoul was high enough that it had indeed manifested in reality, at thing more true that its ghost. As these events have unfolded, each step we have taken increased the odds that this is how I die. But we are not just…mathematical functions, Cal. We are not, in fact, victims of a great pre-written fate. Time—all of it, all of human history—is a great big messy conflagration of connectivity, of people making choices and choosing outcomes and all of it is just tangling together until what could be coalesces into what is–but still, people choose. I have told you before how little time I have for great men and the great things they are meant to do, but people…people are always choosing, billions of choices in every second, each on tiny, each one taken together changing the world, and we—we travellers—we have the privilege of seeing these choices made real. What is history, Cal if not the story of people choosing, every day, in every single moment, and then living with the consequences? We should live with consequences. Living without is what makes people cruel.
From “Good Weird or Bad Weird,” by Collin Burrow for the London Review of Books:
So what are those pleasures? What is the point? The core act of literary criticism sounds simple. It is sitting down with a bit of writing and thinking about it. Then there should be a head-exploding moment of making connections between its different bits and perhaps bits of one’s own experience or stuff that’s happening in the world now or which was happening in the world around the person who wrote it. Sometimes the thing you’re reading will seem alien or baffling to start with. But the key thing to remember is that it once mattered to someone enough to make them shape it and write it down, so there has to be something there, even if finally you decide it shouldn’t have mattered as much as it did to the person who wrote it, or that it doesn’t really work. You might think about the way it manages to create a particular effect and you might learn how to write from thinking about the way it’s done (are there tricks, bits of compositional magic you can learn from?), or you might just feel a shiver at understanding something you never thought could be understood.
From From the Library of Jurgen Leitner, by Premee Mohamed and Jonathan Sims:
they were short on shelf space, and any opening was an invitation to take a book off a pile, or the floor, and fill the gap.
From May We Feed the King, by Rebecca Perry:
The single sheet dedicated to his reign was now a mess, with marginalia and footnotes, added over time as his story retrospectively evolved—was altered, challenged, embellished, struck through, left to rest as one great question mark by people who damned him.
