Belle

“You're becoming. You're in the process of becoming. You just don't know what yet.
That felt right. It felt okay to stop there, for now, as we walked through the future.”
― David Levithan, You Know Me Well

“All you can do, Rosemary – all any of us can do – is work to be something positive instead. That is a choice that every sapient must make every day of their life. The universe is what we make of it. It’s up to you to decide what part you will play.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“Everything that dies never really goes. In little ways, it all stays." Not in the horrific way Lee wrote it. Not with the moaning ghosts and terrifying poltergeists and living dead, but in the way the sun came back around again, the way flowers browned and became dirt and new seeds bloomed the next spring. Everything died, but pieces of it remained.”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics

“As I write this, we are in an especially divisive era in American politics. There are questions about who holds power, who abuses it, who profits from it, and at what cost to our democracy. It is a time of questions about what makes us American, of shifting identities, inclusion and exclusion, protest, civil and human rights, the strength of our compassion versus the weakness of our fears, and the seductive lure of a mythic "great" past that never was versus the need for the consciousness and responsibility necessary if we are truly to live up to the rich promise of "We the People."

We are a country built by immigrants, dreams, daring, and opportunity.

We are a country built by the horrors of slavery and genocide, the injustice of racism and exclusion. These realities exist side by side. It is our past and present. The future is unwritten.

This is a book about ghosts.

For we live in a haunted house.”
― Libba Bray, Before the Devil Breaks You