Torapie

“I have committed a terrible crime,” she said, voice firm, controlled, machined to a polish. “So terrible that I feel I can do anything, commit any sin, betray any trust, because no matter what ruin I make of myself, it cannot be worse than what I have already done.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“All I've ever tried to do is the right thing. If that's so very different from how things have been done before, then what's done before was wrong.”
― Moniquill Blackgoose, To Shape a Dragon's Breath

“I have a theory," Tain Hu said, "regarding your attention to birds."
"Oh?"
"It's the only tongue of your homeland that you can still hear spoken aloud.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“I saw them all, suddenly, for just a moment, through non-Radchaai eyes, an eddying crowd of unnervingly ambiguously gendered people. I saw all the features that would mark gender for non-Radchaai—never, to my annoyance and inconvenience, the same way in each place. Short hair or long, worn unbound (trailing down a back, or in a thick, curled nimbus) or bound (braided, pinned, tied). Thick-bodied or thin-, faces delicate-featured or coarse-, with cosmetics or none. A profusion of colors that would have been gender-marked in other places. All of this matched randomly with bodies curving at breast and hip or not, bodies that one moment moved in ways various non-Radchaai would call feminine, the next moment masculine. Twenty years of habit overtook me, and for an instant I despaired of choosing the right pronouns, the right terms of address. But I didn't need to do that here. I could drop that worry, a small but annoying weight I had carried all this time. I was home.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice