alexis

“Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“It feels so American to discount dreams because they’re not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Fortune finds those who leap, my Tru. Whatever yours is—riches or love or adventure—you make it yourself. Nothing is predetermined. Not by the gods, not by the lines on your palm or the creases on your brow.”
― Elizabeth Lim, A Forgery of Fate

“That I am Filipino means I understand guilt, in the complicated way only a Catholic raised in the colonized Philippines knows guilt. I know why a father kneels to wash away his son's blood while muttering apologies into the linoleum. I know he believes himself responsible for failing to stop the four bullets that burst through his thirty-year-old son's body: forehead, chest, and narrow shoulders, in a manner he sees as the sign of the cross—in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country