Evie

“Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands.
Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me. I'd never be able to walk through a bookstore without fingering the spines with longing, wondering at the lengthy editorial process that got these titles on shelves and reminiscing about my own. And I'd spend the rest of life curdling with jealousy every time someone like Emmy Cho gets a book deal, every time I learn that some young up-and-comer is living the life I should be living.

Writing has formed the core of my identity since I was a child. After Dad died, after Mom withdrew into herself, and after Rory decided to forge a life without me, writing gave me a reason to stay alive. And as miserable as it makes me, I'll cling to that magic for as long as I live.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“For a while I feel released from its hold, as much as I know it might claim rights over me. I tell myself it does not own me. But all I had done was close off one door of many. The other place is a world inside me, I carry with me wherever I go.”
― Polly Atkin, Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better

“It is not the prisoner's right to open his cell that is in question, Mrs Touchet it is the gaoler's fraud in claiming to hold a man prisoner in the first place. The first is self-evident. The second, wholly criminal.”
― Zadie Smith, The Fraud