Dalila

“Pain was in the body, but pain also seeped into the walls. Pain started in the body, but it latched to a soul and tried to take it. Pain could disappear people;”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

“People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn. But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film. ·”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“I've had my eyes taken from me twenty-three hours a day. The one hour I'm out of the hole is the worst of them all. I spend the fifty-nine minutes afraid to go back in.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

“When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.”
― Ted Chiang, The Great Silence