Isabella

“Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“You listen to me,” she says. Her jaw is set, ironclad. It’s the game face he’s seen her use to stare down Congress, to cow autocrats. Her grip on his hand is steady and strong. He wonders, half-hysterically, if this is how it felt to charge into war under Washington. “I am your mother. I was your mother before I was ever the president, and I’ll be your mother long after, to the day they put me in the ground and beyond this earth. You are my child. So, if you’re serious about this, I’ll back your play.”
Alex is silent.
But the debates, he thinks. But the general.
Her gaze is hard. He knows better than to say either of those things. She’ll handle it.
“So,” she says. “Do you feel forever about him?”
And there’s no room left to agonize over it, nothing left to do but say the thing he’s known all along.
“Yeah,” he says, “I do.”
Ellen Claremont exhales slowly, and she grins a small, secret grin, the crooked, unflattering one she never uses in public, the one he knows best from when he was a kid”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“For the first time since I submitted the manuscript, I feel a deep wash of shame. This isn’t my history, my heritage. This isn’t my community. I am an outsider, basking in their love under false pretenses. It should be Athena sitting here, smiling with these people, signing books and listening to the stories of her elders.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface