Iona Scheer

“[I] wondered if he was looking up at that same moon, far away, and thinking of me as I was thinking of him.”
― Vera Brittain, Chronicle of Youth: The War Diary, 1913-1917

“Trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves. Which was that translation was impossible. That the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known. That the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception. For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language. There was no candidate - not English, not French - that could bully and absorb enough to become one. 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 endeavor however futile, to move between them.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“It occurred to him now that people are defined much more by their association with death than by what they do in life. Poor thing, she’s a widow, they say. She lost her mother when she was ten to cancer. I’ve been immune to all this, he thought.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“Her voice, thin and reedy, faded without echo into the frigid air. But she screamed it again, and then again, and then again. It felt so good to say that she'd survived, that she'd fucking finally come out on top, that she didn't even care that she was screaming to corpses.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God