Julia

“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.”
― Percival Everett, James

“Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glassy office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage. She had had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could imagine. She had been able to do little in the years of her life, and that little had been ill paid or punished. The rest was garbage.”
― Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

“And the first child asked: Dost thou oppose me, and thou half-dead?

And the second child said, I am as one half-dead, but you would be two-halves dead, bitch.

To which the first child said, My sweet, I only die of longing for thee.

And the other child said, Then perish.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

“A guilty system recognizes no innocents.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games