Torapie

“She was smiling, and for the first time, the building, the city, this place… felt like hers. A place she’d still be tomorrow, the week after, next season, next year…. Home.”
― Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes

“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

“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

“It's not what the Masquerade does to you that you should you fear, she wanted to tell Ake. It's what the Masquerade convinces you to do to yourself.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant