"It’s just a thing. You deal with it." "As in, one damn thing after another?" "Yes, very like." - Lois McMaster Bujold

“I have a particular aversion to stalemates. I prefer winning wars to prolonging them.”
She sighed, momentarily drained, tired, old. “I’ve been at war a long time, y’know? After a while even losing a war can start to look preferable to prolonging it.”

From fried witchetty grubs to gold-plated turnips, when you're a writer you never know what's going to appear on your plate next. It keeps a woman alert, it does.

It was lately suggested to me, by a man with longer experience of the gods than I can rightly imagine, that the reason the gods do not show our paths more plainly is that They do not know either. I haven’t decided if I find this reassuring or the reverse. It does hint they do not torment us solely for Their amusement, at least.