Nevena

“In principle, all women should give themselves permission to demand good treatment, but the world made doing so profoundly difficult”
― Asako Yuzuki, Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder

“The most difficult stories about the Khmer Rouge are the ones over which hover almost and maybe. She almost made it, but dysentery took her at the end. He is maybe buried in the mass grave at Choeung Ek, so we will pay our respects there. He almost walked all the way to Thailand, but the cadres found him in the forest. She maybe saw her infant son one last time before she was taken. Anne Spencer almost made it off those wards. After I read the email, an ancient and exuberant terror blazed through me. It was partly the terror that had grown in me alongside my very bones, knowing as I did that I only existed because my mother had outrun almost; I don’t know at what point you stop feeling the need to run, generation by generation, when you’re born after that. But it was also a wonderful, simple, human terror. The one where death brushes too close to you and you abruptly remember what an insane gift it is to be alive, and how much you’d like to stay alive even when death is laughing at your window, laughing in your mirror.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“You misunderstand how history works,” she said. “ History is not a series of cause and effects which may be changed… It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening.”

“History id what we need to happen. You talk about changing history, but you’re trying to change the future.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time