I don't know about you, but I think it's perfectly legitimate for a woman to ask the tough questions in life, like why if you're God you select the female breast as the most prevalent site for terminal cancer. The breast is the fuel tank for every developing child in the world. What kind of engineer designs faulty fuel tanks straight into the blueprint?

In the 1970s there was a certain model of gas-burner that was famous for bursting into flames if another car so much as nudged its fender--they called it the Pinto. I was reminded of this car when my aunt Mary died, still undergoing radiation therapy, during my sophomore year in college. One of her fuel tanks leaked death everywhere in her lymph system, and she was gone in three months. So that's one of the very hardest questions. Creator, there is a never-ending plague on the breast. What is Your point?

But it's one of those questions that just don't get answered, ever. You have to either accept the fact that God isn't always up front with His plans and move on, or go insane.
from chapter 2 of The X President, Philip Baruth

"Grace under pressure is one thing, but I like to fight when the going gets tough, for what I want, and I was determined to make this work."
- Kate Mulgrew, on the challenge of succeeding as Captain Janeway in the 'petri dish' of launching Voyager. The Star Trek Reporter, March-May 1998.

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. By Order of the Author."
- Mark Twain

"Of course he has a knife--we all have knives. It's 1183 and we're barbarians. How clear we make it.

Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war--not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government--nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars.

We carry it, like syphilis, inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten.

For the love of God, can't we love one another just a little? That's how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for. We have such possibilities, my children. We could change the world.
- Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in Goldman's The Lion in Winter (1968)

If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?

In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.

It was Sita Dulip of Cincinnati who first realised this, and so discovered the interplanar technique most of us now use. [...] She had discovered that, by a mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, she could go anywhere--be anywhere--because she was already between planes.
from Changing Planes, Ursula Le Guin

The airport bookstores did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
Changing Planes, Ursula Le Guin

The book on top, a lover
staring into my eyes.
[...]
When I'm done with each word,
it gets up off the page
and lies down beside me in the bed;
soon I am surrounded by burrowing
words, who fall asleep before I do
and leave me alone under covers
like words in a book myself.
Bury me with books,
all of them cracked wide open.
No satin, only the feel of this legible
dry skin under my cold fingers.
Be sure my head is propped a little,
next to a reading light.

from "Lying in Bed with a Book," Philip Dacey

"She's a student," protested Coelle. "What will I tell her parents if . . . if she doesn't . . . "
"I don't know," said Sabriel. "I have never known what to tell anybody. Except that it is better to do something than to do nothing, even if the cost is great."
From Garth Nix's Abhorsen, Book Three of The Old Kingdom Trilogy