lilla

“They melted into a series of deep, lush kisses, hot and dizzying and endless, lips moving together, Crier’s mouth opening beneath Ayla’s, the taste of her like summer rain. Ayla pushed into her over and over again, taking her mouth, already addicted to this, to her, to Crier, everything about her, taste and scent and the warmth of her skin under Ayla’s hands.”
― Nina Varela, Iron Heart

“Crier wasn’t a book or a map or anyth8ing else that could be read once and known in its entirety. Nothing finite like that. There was no beginning to her, no end, no parameters; her body was not the truth of her; Ayla knew that Crier herself was something as wide and endless as the ice fields or the black sea or the evening sky, just as the first stars were beginning to appear. Those first pinpricks of light.”
― Nina Varela, Iron Heart

“And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“They were still holding hands. They hadn’t let go, not even once. Ayla’s hand was sweaty; there was dirt and sweat and probably blood slicking their palms, but she didn’t want to lose this point of contact. This point of warmth, solidity, in the middle of a huge and frightening thing. The machinery of war.”
― Nina Varela, Iron Heart