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41 " If we're to be at war, we might as well entertain one another. "
― Max Gladstone , This Is How You Lose the Time War
42 " Sometimes you have to hold a person, though they'll mistake embrace for strangulation. "
43 " So in this letter, I am yours. "
44 " There's a kind of time travel in letters, isn't there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never - and I have to write the rest of this not knowing. "
45 " Adventure works in any strand- it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives. "
46 " Words hurt, but metaphors go between, like bridges, and words are like stone to build bridges, hewn from the earth in agony but making a new thing, a shared thing. "
47 " I have been birds and branches. I have been bees and wolves. I have been ether flooding the void between stars, tangling their breath into networks of song. I have been fish and plankton and humus, and all these have been me. "
― Amal El-Mohtar , This Is How You Lose the Time War
48 " She cannot stop herself from reaching out, from trying with a touch to say, I'm here. Sometimes you have to hold a person, though they'll mistake embrace for strangulation. "
49 " I don’t give a shit who wins this war, Garden or the Agency, towards whose shift the arc of the universe bends. But maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win. "
50 " Perhaps survival is its own form of torture. "
51 " Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt. I can hide in words so long as I scatter them through my body; to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room. "
52 " They would make this war, she thinks, if there were not a war already made for them to make. "
53 " Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so. Letters of only one word. Letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair. Letters that will bite you. Letters that will mark you. I’ll write you by bullet ant and spider wasp. I’ll write you by shark’s tooth and scallop shell. "
54 " Even poetry, which breaks language into meaning - poetry ossifies, in time, the way trees do. What’s supple, whipping, soft and fresh grows hard, grows armor. If I could touch you, put my finger into your temple and sink you into me the way Garden does - perhaps then. But I would never. "
55 " I wish sometimes I could be less fierce with you. No- I feel sometimes like I ought to want to be less fierce with you. "
56 " She wants there to be a God, so she can curse Her. "
57 " I wonder what of me there is in you. "
58 " Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt. "
59 " Like your victory, love spreads back through time. It claims our earliest association, our battles and losses. Assassinations become assignations. "
60 " Red's letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers' tips, between the lines of her palms. "