Else

“It was always a strange thing coming home. Coming home meant that you had, at one point, left it and in doing so, irreversibly changed. How odd then to be able to return to a place that would always be anchored in your notion of the past? How could this place still be there if the you that once lived there no longer existed?”
― Becky Chambers

“The…the worst thing about this place,” she hissed slowly, forcing the words out, “isn’t that it treats people like chattel.”

[...] “The worst part,” she whispered, breathing hard, “just the worst part, is that it tricks you.”

[...] “It makes you think you’re a thing. It makes you resign yourself to becoming a crude good. It makes things out of people so thoroughly, they…they don’t even know that they’ve become things. Even after you’re free, you don’t even know how to be free! It changes your reality, and you don’t know how to change it back!”

[...] “It’s a system,” she said. “A…device. Tevanne and the world it builds for us…it’s a machine.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside

“[..] people fear knowledge. Knowledge is hard, and grotesque, and messy, and it eats away at whatever you believe in.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak

“Only now am I seeing a new truth: that sometimes the broken bits are just the pieces you need to create something new, something better, something remarkable" -Raffy”
― Ryan La Sala, Be Dazzled