Anthony

“The waters of Inle Lake are blue and so shallow you can see the bottom on a cloudless day. This is where ladies bathe their newborn babies. This is where the dead float with their eyes toward the sky. This was where my friends came the morning of Christmas Eve.”
― Amy Tan

“We have told you about some of them [gods] -- Yshwa, for example. Ala, the controller of minor gods, our mother. BUt there are others, and anyone who knows anything knows this, knows about the godly stowaways that came along with the corrupters stole our people, what the swollen hulls carried over the bellied seas, the masks, the skin on the inside of the drum, the words under the words, the water in the water. the stories that survived, the new names they took the temper of old gods sweeping through new land, the music taken that is the same as the music left behind. And, of course, the humans who survived, those selected among them, the ones in white, the ones shaking shells and mineral deposits, the ones ridden, the ones chosen, the ones who follow, work, and serve because calls pass through blood no matter how many oceans you drop death into.”
― Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater

“Life was good until the purges came. After that, there was nothing to do except flee into the jungle, high up, where it was so thick only wild things grew. When the purges stopped Black Spot and his friends and cousin went quietly to the town of Nyang Shwe, where they were not known. They procured black-market identity cards of dead people with good reputations. After that they lived two ways: in the open life of the dead, and in the hidden life of the living.”
― Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning

“You came here to speak of what is means to love your best friend. Ask: if flexing is being able to say the most in the fewest number of words, is there a greater flex than love? Nowhere to hide, nowhere to go, a direct gaze.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water