The hostage game is a bad game, a sad and ugly game that’s a lot easier to start than end. The worst versions I’ve seen ended up with neither side in… - Lois McMaster Bujold

It still felt like hauling buckets from a well of memory with a rope that burned his hands.

To this day she didn’t know if he taken her disgusted refusal to defend herself for a covert admission of guilt.

Reading is an active and elusive experience. Every reader, reading exactly the same text, will have a slightly different reading experience depending on what s/he projects into the words s/he sees, what strings of meaning and association those words call up in his/her (always) private mind. One can never therefore, talk about the quality of a book separately from the quality of the mind that is creating it by reading it, in the only place books live, in the secret mind.