A steampunk nationBaby pollution rises up then the loving comes arraigning 'causeOur art's official and only partially artificialAnd our heart's in the middle of sharp hardened shards of metal butThere's not where it settlesBecause it's beating to the steaming of God's hottest pot or kettleAnd now we face it, this creation we made toTo save our craving for a synthetic rebelnation it'sOur safeway they make into a pathetic revelationIn our steampunk nationOur steampunk nation

I tell you all the time, you will never be able to replace me with a brass and steam contraption.

Torque was the greatest thing in the world, as far as Lina was concerned.

The idea of marrying Lukan made her skin crawl. He was a Chenayan. She, a Norin. He was her conqueror. She, his conquered. He had been born and raised to lord over her. She had been born and raised to hate him. They might as well have been different species.

May your song guide you home.

As if the president gives a crap about demons and what they go through just because her father’s got horns?” Morganith returned. “She never opens her coward mouth about the quiet oppression the demons -- your people -- face every single day --!” “Our people,” Hari calmly corrected. “No,” said Morganith at once. “Halflings have never been anyone’s people.

Junk?” Lina repeated, incredulous. Oh, she wasn’t about to let that pass.

Whatever you do, don’t make it worse by trying to come up with some flimsy excuse for why you were in the ventilation shaft, Lina told herself.

She wanted to make sure she studied all the manuals thoroughly, but she had to admit that part of her hesitation was the unsettling length of the list of things that could go wrong if she mishandled the pressure.

Normally, she would never wish a head injury on anyone, but it might make her days in Archival Studies a bit easier.

Dust is not a constant. There’s not a fixed quantity that has always been the same. Conscious beings make Dust—they renew it all the time, by thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on. And if you help everyone else in your worlds to do that, by helping them to learn and understand about themselves and each other and the way everything works, and by showing them how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious…Then they will renew enough to replace what is lost through one window. So there could be one left open.

In the void, there is no distinction of east and west."Gwen blinked slightly at that. "I know all of those words, and yet when strung together like that I have no idea what they mean.

He had an image in his mind of a gaggle of long-necked geese, all done up in petticoats and crinolines, sitting around a stuffy parlor and talking about him.

I do the same with my books...Nothing like a good argument in the margins with someone who's already said all they have to say on the subject.

Cursed the crown that brought such grief to me

The odd was the ordinary at Alistair Grim's. The people who lived there were odd. The things they did there were odd. Even the there itself there was odd.

Freedom is a state of mind.

It should be said that my parents had married for love. The affection and devotion they had shared was the rarest of indulgences, perhaps especially in those days. For them, it had been love at first sight, and so my mother's death shattered my father. That it only dimmed his light rather than snuffed it out altogether was a miracle in and of itself. ~The Peacemakers ~(The Nemesis Engines)

I had rescued myself entirely.

Living on steam isn't easy.

«“I meant, tell me all about this steampunk thing!” Gavin broke in. “How does that concept work out for you people, here in Brazil?”“You don’t know about steampunk?” shouted Xavier, dubiously.“Well, I don’t read many novels! Because I’m kinda fully-booked already! But, obviously, you’re a science fiction writer at a Futurist conference! And I can see that you’re all dressed up like some fancy guy from the past, from the 19th century! So what gives with that? What is all that about?”»

Everything was a broken line for me in those days. I was slipped into the empty spaces between words.

Geoff’s arm emanated with a solid warmth I longed for after our days aboard S.S. British-Craphole.

I have to believe it’s right to be a warm voice, a companion if I can be, as soon as ever I find a friend.

When you read my stories, I want you to see the world through my eyes; as if I based my work on you. Come away with me, and I'll show you a world that you've never seen before or ever want to leave.

The cracks grew over him like vines, faster and faster. At first he bucked, whinnying metallic screeches. Then he gradually stilled, looking up at me with frightened glass eyes.He was growing.New, molten glass leeched out between his fissures, cooled and hardened only to crack again and make room for more liquid glass. The gears inside him moaned and creaked, and metal filings gathered at the base of his transparent stomach, only to fly up again and form more joints and chains and gears. Black smoke poured from his nostrils.Soon he was the size of a large dog, then a man, and still he grew and grew until he towered over my bed, as big as any plow horse I’d ever seen. Glass dripped down his flanks like sweat, a few rivulets still glowing with molten heat.

Music can make you feel things that aren’t yours—sadness, or love, or joy. A good song has a magic to it. It pulls you in and the feelings in the music take over and you become the music, you become the song.

This time he had no choice but to look into her eyes. He did not look away. It was the bright fierce gaze that she remembered so vividly from their first meeting. He’d reminded her of an eagle, the Castellan of Amyth

We learned the seven traditional ways to make words unclear.""Seven? That many? Which was the most effective?""Poor grammar skills.

Indeed. I have often thought that when a man selects one word over another he often reveals far more of himself than he intended.

Here lies the body of Colonel Cornell’s. The rest of the fellow, I fancy, in hell is.

And now we both blushed, because things like changing one’s garments should not be discussed among a Queen and one of her subjects.

Once more for Britain,� I said to the empty room. I might not be the Queen everyone wanted me to be, but I was intelligent and fully capable of breaking the code.

But I don't want to be a vampire drone.' Sophronia winced. 'They'll suck my blood and make me wear only the very latest fashions.

I like stories about supervillains. They teach children that you can accomplish great things even when the whole world is against you.

Trust me, there are things in this mountain that will make your jaw bounce off the floor.

I'm always homesick for the journey,” I had once written in ink speckled script, adding almost as an afterthought, “...no matter what it may hold.

There are creatures in this world, small things and pretty things, which burn within them a fire for survival.

That is the difference between great men and small, we great are willing to do the hard things, the uncomfortable things to ensure we succeed.

What do you mean, my life is at risk?" I questioned. "From one of the other professors?""Oh, it goes much deeper than that, Freddy," he said with a half crazed, wide eyed smile. Leaning in, he whispered, "I stole something.

Not another word, not another thought, not another sniffle. If you need to pass gas, I pray you'll clench your backside and keep walking until we are certainly alone.

The tools of their trade were simple, effective things: iron knuckles, saps and the like. But the iconic tool of the scuttler arsenal was a woven leather belt with a heavy iron or brass buckle used to decrease intelligence one wallop at a time.

When John-Joseph Heller's fights became too much of a sure thing, story has it he moved on to more risky fights with grown men and even starved dogs. Though he was scarred often, he was never beaten. But as he brought each opponent to his knees, John-Joseph Heller was also growing up and his vision began to extend further than the ring.

The machines of this place are failing, and the woman and I are here all alone. The perpetual motion engine, as brilliant and beautiful as it is, is running down—nothing lasts forever. But before this little world falls out of the sky there still might be time enough for redemption. There is still time for me to say the words that I should have had the courage to say at the beginning.There is still time, perhaps, for one more miracle.Hello, Miranda.

Soon our culture's oldest dreams will be made real. Even the thought of sending a kind of flying craft to the moon is no longer nothing more than a child's fantasy. At this moment in the cities below us, the first mechanical men are being constructed that will have the capability to pilot the ship on its maiden voyage. But no one has asked if this dream we've had for so long will lose its value once it's realized. What will happen when those mechanical men step out of their ship and onto the surface of this moon, which has served humanity for thousands of years as our principal icon of love and madness? When they touch their hands to the ground and perform their relentless analyses and find no measurable miracles, but a dead gray world of rocks and dust? When they discover that it was the strength of millions of boyhood daydreams that kept the moon aloft, and that without them that murdered world will fall, spiraling slowly down and crashing into the open sea?

She is mad, and I am sane. To speak to her, even the first word, would be an acknowledgement and an acceptance of her madness, and from there I would have no choice but to follow her down the hole until both of us would be here alone in this ship among the clouds, endlessly circling the earth, our needs carefully ministered to by mechanical men, howling ourselves hoarse and counting off the ticks of the clock before the moon falls out of the sky.

Steampunk is Victorian science fiction

hand. I was charged with organizing the messages: descriptions of the creatures, descriptions of their space vessels, descriptions of their conveyances, of their weapons, of their movements. Positions of our soldiers, of our allies’ soldiers. Troop movements. New arrivals of space vessels. Reports of casualties. Dear God, the casualties. And their descriptions. Charred piles of ash; bloodless carcases; crumpled, broken bodies; crushed jelly; roasted, dead meat. All…in these hands.

It was the dog Abel, who - as animals have been reported to do - had made his way over all England's hills and rivers, to return to that home where he was first kindly treated. The warm fire, by which he sleeps even now, and the fattening dish will be his rewards to the end of his days.

As they walked, it seemed almost every building had some similar contrivance as decoration, adorning the street in a cacophony of clangs, bangs and whirs. The street’s surroundings danced with steam and smoke, the scent of oil and grease its perfume.

We're fragile things, Harb. It doesn't look like it but we are. We're here one minute, and just like that, we're gone. The Peacemakers (The Nemesis Engines)

These violators responded only as cowards could. They ran.

she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her.

Be happy. Be free. You have a universe inside you.

And then there was an explosion.

Never before had he seen a woman so angry—or so seductive. It rendered him speechless. He couldn’t fight the compulsion to kiss her.She punched him on the chin, snapping his head back.

He could sit in the dust and dark of the carriage house and rot for the rest of his life. Clearly that's what he wished to do. It was not my place to get in the way of so profound a destiny.

The Girauds' child was looking more and more like a problem.Luke pressed his lips into a thin line. When she'd leaned in the stagecoach blazing with fervor over what was in the arcane books, it had taken all his willpower not to throw a bolt of magic to stop her heart.

My station has barely recovered from the massacre, and we have not held my formal coronation, not to mention the fact I am only eighteen years of age and have no parent present. How on earth do people expect me to find a husband in all of this nonsense?

Let us fly, Madam Harpy Queen. Show me how you dance on the wind.

After four marriages, and four deaths, she had everything in life a woman might desire: titled position, swollen coffers, the freedom to travel, and a world that accepted her because it was afraid of her.

Gavin tried not to stare at the lobster. He decided not to inquire further. Whatever Jack's reasoning, best to accept that crustaceans were necessary to his view of the world.

Mortals trotted about in shoes and corsets made to limit movement, fashion for prey.

So this is how the merchant ship won’t follow us,” I mumbled, “They aren’t insane enough to join the party.

Rejoice in the colours…

The last thing I remembered was joining the crew in a rendition of “Take to the Sky,” but the rest of the time blurred after I drank absinthe with the Captain.

«I love both her and them. I have come to understand that she is what they are. A woman accepts a man, expecting that he will change. A man takes a woman, expecting that she will never change. They are both disappointed. Yet within this very disappointment is the primal source of all new men and all new women»

It takes use to make knowledge worthwhile.

OMG YOU GUYS it has come to my attention that SOMEONE on the internet is saying that my fictional 19th century zombies are NOT SCIENTIFICALLY SOUND. Naturally, I am crushed. To think, IF ONLY I’d consulted with a zombologist or two before sitting down to write, I could’ve avoided ALL THIS EMBARRASSMENT.

What makes us the strongest tribe on the continent is the fact that a group that opposes these values--a group that would have mankind remain in the new dark ages--is permitted to grow, permitted to exist...and, after it becomes a violent terrorist organization, is allowed to live on it own lands, taken out of the lands of those it has attacked and continues to attack!" He had to stop speaking then--the applause was louder than even his amplified voice. "They expect that fear will drive us to become like them...closed-minded, blind, angry. Our society will remain open and free so long as I am standing upright," he continued, once the applause died down.

Goons were the lowest sort of homunculi, only superior to zombies.

It was during Latin that the Austro-Hungarians arrived with their dogs and zombies to kill everyone at the Eden College for Young Ladies.

The important question is, what will your wear for a wedding dress, Alexia? You look horrible in white.

But there was nothing. No village or town as far as her eyes could strain. Nowhere for her saviours to come from and take her to; just fields and trees and the weeping arc of the river Greave all the way to the horizon. Just like in the books, Greaveburn was all there was; building and building until streets were foundations, roofs were floors, constantly climbing away from itself. now that Abrasia saw it, her dream of escape crumbled completely like an ancient map in her fingers. The horizon was the world's edge and there was nothing beyond it but mist and falling.Greaveburn stood alone on this little circle of earth, the river running around and into itself like a snake eating its tail. And Abrasia was doomed to watch the sun and stars trade places for all eternity.