Pithia

[pithia]

Yet the good days sweep aside all the tedious and mediocre ones like dust off a table.

—from Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

[pithia]

Already, I sensed something forming between us, tendrils of guilt and envy weaving like fast-growing vines into the cracks of our friendship.

—from Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

[pithia]

The high emotions I'd been riding for the past week were running out like the last bit of wool off a spindle.

—from Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

[pithia]

They were cordial enough with each other, but so different that when the three of us were together, I felt like a bridge spanning a river between two countries.

—from Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

[pithia]

I was frozen, frozen like a rabbit in an eagle's shadow, frozen as the breath before death.

—from Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

[pithia]

The two words shrieked in my mind at the same time and crashed, like two of my brother's warring stones flung into each other, meeting in midair with equal force, falling.

—from Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

[pithia]

My excitement ran like a fever—the blood hot in my head, my fingertips tingling and swollen.

—from Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

[pithia]

I want it to be insignificant. A minor trauma. I am terrified, though, that it's a seed nestling down and starting to sprout black tendrils that will drag me into a dark pit.

—from Known to the Victim by Kelley Armstrong

[pithia]

When you've devoted your life to spotting predators, every dog looks like a wolf.

—from Known to the Victim by Kelley Armstrong

[pithia]

That's what depression does: people think you just need something to cheer you up, and sometimes, you brain takes that 'good' thing and weaponizes it against you.

—from Known to the Victim by Kelley Armstrong

[pithia]

Sometimes, the guilt... crushes me, as if I should have heard the sonic boom of my life exploding.

—from Known to the Victim by Kelley Armstrong

[pithia]

The music... comes down ghostly and slow, like snow rather than sound.

—from And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed

[pithia]

I thought I had ignored those speeches. I certainly scoffed at them when they were given. Now I see they were grit and have become, inside me, a pearl. Misshapen, I suspect. Not nice and round.

—from And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed

[pithia]

And the wind rips her words away and carries them around us and I picture them like small furious birds of prey, their talons piercing something furry and struggling.

—from And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed

[pithia]

It occurred to me that these things—to prepare the dead, to gather in the act of mourning—are among the hardest to shift in a people. That they move slowly and stubbornly, and that people cling to the practices they know for centuries, millennia, through famine, war, assimilation, invasion, colonization, plague, decline, despair.

—from And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed

[pithia]

[S]he was becoming distilled, concentrated to an essence of wild strength.

—from The Goblins of Bellwater by Molly Ringle

[pithia]

Something gave way inside her. The scrap of humanity she'd been clinging to now seemed about as inconsequential as a dead leaf. She relaxed her grip and let it fall.

—from The Goblins of Bellwater by Molly Ringle