Everything in language is a metaphor. We use metaphors to talk about metaphors. Chair is not chair. Chalk is not chalk. It’s already a metaphor.
(Source: falsedilemmas, via miriamforster)
http://www.englishmonarchs.co.uk/images/various/200px-Catherine_of_Braganza.jpg
http://www.ethiopianrestaurant.com/amharic_common_phrases.html
http://ethiopianadoptiontravelogue.wordpress.com/2007/08/21/my-amharic-phrases/
Definitely one of the best Attolia fanarts I’ve ever seen!
So, I re-read The Scorpio Races recently, because I love it with a love that is pure and fire-y and demands frequent fuel. Or something (don’t know where I was going with that metaphor). Anyway, one of the things I love about it is how Puck sees Sean as this silent character, while during Sean’s narration, there are all kinds of lovely little poetic moments. Like this:
Corr’s not at all tired form the gallop the night before, and Puck’s horse is fresh and hot in the wind. We circle and tag, gallop and skirmish. I pull ahead until Corr is distracted and then PUck is suddenly beside us, her dun mare’s ears pricked and clever. We match stride for stride, not racing, just running for the sake of it.
Or this:
As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there’s something below it, I won’t know it. But that’s part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn’t the ocean that killed my father, in the end. The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I’m perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me.
I’m so glad this book got the Printz Honor, you guys. Totally deserved.
(Source: sds)
So by now, you may have seen the new covers for the Curse Worker series. If not, here they are:
This has proven to be a tricky series to find the right jackets for and I am really excited by this new direction. It was described to me as the sort of cover…
AH, love the new covers! I loved the old ones too, but these are just lovely. And excerpt!
“Using things connects them to you, being in the world connects you to the world, the sun streams down magic and people and animals and plants grow from sunlight and the world turns and everything is magic. Fairies are more in the magic than in the world, and people are more in the world than in the magic…And God? God is in everything, moving through everything, is the pattern that everything makes, moving. That’s why messing with magic so often becomes evil, because it’s going against that pattern.”
I don’t know that I entirely agree, or rather I don’t think it’s the whole truth, but oh, I love the passage.
“It might have become the ancestor of Caligula’s horse Incitatus who he made a senator.”
Just like Lord Midnight in the Vorkosigan books.
I love it when books overlap.
None of these things did anything. The coffee spoons didn’t stir the coffee without being held or anything. They didn’t have conversations with the sugar tongs about who was the most cherished…I suppose what they really did was psychological. They confirmed the past, they connected everything, they were threads in a tapestry. Here there is no tapestry, we jangle about separately.
If you love books enough, books will love you back.
Jo Walton, Among Others
Really, though, isn’t that the secret wish in the heart of every reader? How clever of Walton to pick it out and make it real, thereby (of course, because I’m weepy) reducing me to longing tears.
