Era ➴

“History isn't a premade tapestry that we've got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“This is why fairy tales are dangerous: their words sneak into your veins and travel into the chambers of your heart, where they whisper of your exceptionalism. They say: Ah, but remember the boy who walked into the woods and came out a king? Oh, but what of the girl who was kicked and slept in ashes? Remember the man who was only kind and so life bent around the shape of his smile? But we are not exceptional.”
― Roshani Chokshi, The Last Tale of the Flower Bride

“If you combed through enough fairy tales, untangled their roots, and shook out their branches, you would find that they are infested with oaths. Oaths are brittle things, not unlike an egg. Though they go by different names depending on the myth— troths and geis, vows and tynged— there is one thing they all share: they must be broken for there to be a story. Only a shattered promise yields a rich, glittering yolk of a tale.”
― Roshani Chokshi, The Last Tale of the Flower Bride

“In fact, she was both my first and second words: Umma, then Mom. I called to her in two languages. Even then I must have known that no one would ever love me as much as she would.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart