Rachel

“We were told what to want: Propaganda was universal. Especially in this country, where the propaganda was that there was none - we were free. But were we? When we were made to value certain lives more than others; when we were made, relentlessly, to want more? What if I had seen through it? What if I had understood that I already had enough?”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“How does one hate a country, or love one?... I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is the love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“And the wind caught the edges of the cloth that covered my window. There I kept vigil, alert to the small, easily becoming, through an open eye, monstrous and beautiful.

I would gaze, gauge and just like that, be gone — vane avion, flitting from earth to earth, unconscious of my awkward arms or wayward socks.”
― Patti Smith, Woolgathering

“I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness