itzel

“You didn’t come.”

“You didn’t call.”

She looks down at their tangled hands. “Tell me, Luc,” she says. “Was any of it real?”

“What is real to you, Adeline? Since my love counts for nothing?”

“You are not capable of love.”

He scowls, his eyes flashing emerald. “Because I am not human? Because I do not wither and die?”

“No,” she says, drawing back her hand. “You are not capable of love because you cannot understand what it is to care for someone else more than yourself. If you loved me, you would have let me go by now.”

Luc flicks his fingers. “What nonsense,” he says. “It is because I love you that I won’t. Love is hungry. Love is selfish.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Words and phrases you think are carved into your bones can disappear in no time.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel