Julia

“And we cannot be unmade. Just because you turned your back on who you are doesn’t mean the fight has stopped.” That’s the thing with unspoken words: sometimes they reach for you.”
― Saara El-Arifi, The Final Strife

“The most common one, Imperial Glyphbook Standard, the one which was distributed Empire-wide—and beyond the official borders of Teixcalaan—to teach barbarians and children to read. It had all the useful words, after all: “to hide,” and “to betray,” and so very many interlocking words for “civilization.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“I’ve always believed, like all rational people, that my selves are separate. That they—we—exist independently. But sometimes when life is too still, when I lie in bed in the quiet, I can feel it all happening. Not just my selves collapsing, but time collapsing, because past and future are other selves just as surely as those on different worlds. My mother is dying right now, and I feel it. But she also recovered, woke up, got clean, and I feel that too. I feel that somewhere I am not alone. And I feel that sometime, soon or not long ago, I will accomplish something great.”
― Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds

“She forced love into this loveless space, made it the subject of her life. She showed them that she, the Hurricane, was capable of great love, and that if they’d look they’d see they were too. And maybe someday they would understand what they’d enabled, what they’d created.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars