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if i look back, i am lost
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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@paperbacksunday
She pours her tea, delicately, without straining the leaves. She lifts her teaspoon to the light—can see that it's coated with a downthread substance she thinks she recognizes but sniffs to be sure. She wills herself not to look around, commands evevry atom of her body into stillness...
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
Absent from your mention of food—so sweet, so savoury— was any mention of hunger. You spoke of the lack of need, yes—no lion in pursuit, no "animalist procreative desperation," and these lead to enjoyment, certainly. But hunger is a many-splendoured thing; it needn't be conceived only in limbic terms, in biology. Hunger, Red— to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth —is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out?
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
We make so much of lettercraft literal, don't we? Whacked seals aside. Letters as time travel, time-travelling letters. Hidden meanings. I wonder what you see me saying here.
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
She reads. Her lips frame syllables one by one. She commits the words the fire frames to the old kind of memory.
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
While Red looks away, a gob of lava splashes toward her face. She catches it in her palm without looking. Her skin, if it were the sort of skin the panicked villagers below wear around their meat, should char. It is not. It does not. Too long watching. She turns back to the caldera, to the welling lava. She stops. Black and gold vein the rising red. Some suns' surfaces look like this, when she visits them on shore leaving.
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
You asked me to tell truths. I have. What do I want? Understanding. Exchange. Victory. A game—hiding and discovery.
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
Eating's gross, isn't it? In the abstract, I mean. When you're used to hyperspace recharging stations, to sunlight and cosmic rays, when most of the beauty you've known lies in a great machine's heart, it's hard to see the appeal of using bones that poke from spit-coated gums to mash things that grew in dirt into a paste that will fit down the wet tube connecting your mouth to the sack of acid under your heart.
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
There's a kind of time travel in letter, 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 adress empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could never return—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
Now that you've discovered postscripts, I look forward to what you could do with scented inks and seals!
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
It occurs to me to dwell on what a microcosm we are as a whole, you and I. The physics of us. An action and an equal and opposite reaction. My viny-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia. We both know it's nothing simple, any more than a letter's reply is its opposite. But which egg preceeded what platypus? The ends don't always resemble our means.
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
"And then we'd be at each other's throats even more." Oh petal. You say that like it's a bad thing.
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
She memorizes the message. She feels it ridge by ridge, line by line, and perform a slow arithmetic of years.
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
The letter begins in the tree's heart. Rings, thicker here and thinner there, form symbols in an alphabet no one present knows but Red. The words are small, sometimes smudged, but still: ten years per line of text, and many lines. Mapping routes, depositing or draining nutrients year by year, the message must have taken a century to craft.
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
May causality forbid Commandment ever dispatch me to one of your viney-hivey elfworlds, profusely floral, all arching elder trees, neural pollen, bees gathering memories from eyes and tongue, honey libraries dripping knowledge from the comb.
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
Did her adversary— did Blue— ever read her letter? Red liked writing it— winning tastes sweet, but sweeter still to triumph and tease. To dare reprisal.
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
Start a stone rolling, so in three centuries you'll have an avalanche.
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War
Will you respond, establishing complicity, continuing our self-destructive paper trail, just to get in the last word? Will you cut off, leaving my note to spin its fractal math inside you?
— Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War