#*litquoteedit

The thing about war, boy, is while it happens, you’ve no idea what's going on–and when it’s over, everyone spends the rest of your life telling you what you did. - Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup

“My duty is to let you all die,” he told her, not even harshly but with a terrible misery, the sadness of hundreds of years. “I should just walk away and let this happen, and record the story of it for those to come, as though there is anyone who will ever come. I should not be here. I am not a part of your stories.” - Adrian Tchaikovsky, Elder Race

His life had been punctuated by horrible awakenings, in and out of cold sleep as the ark ship conducted its centuries-long odyssey. Each time he had found himself in another time, another world, less fit for human habitation. That was what the nightmares were about: not the cold itself, which was only a trigger. Not even that he might not wake, though that had been a real possibility with the Gilgamesh’s failing life support. He feared waking once more into a world he didn’t understand, where everyone else had rushed ahead and left him behind. - Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

"I think," Juna says, after a pause, "that the thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterward. D’you know what I mean? The endlessness of that." She looks sideways at me and sniffs. "My friends were sad, people who knew my sister were sad, but everyone moves on after a month. It’s all they can manage. It doesn’t mean they weren’t sad, just that things keep going or something, I don’t know." She rolls her shoulder, shakes her head. "It’s hard when you look up and realize that everyone’s moved off and left you in that place by yourself. Like they’ve all gone on and you’re there still, holding on to this person you’re supposed to let go of." - Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under The Sea