Judy Thomas

“Who were you? When you were alive?” Emily said, her voice thick with wonder. “Tell me everything.” “Oh, I wasn’t anybody. Just a girl. I lived in a house like girls do. I loved a man once, loved him so much I couldn’t tell the difference between him and me. But he wasn’t the kind of man anyone should love. He took my heart and he took it and pinched it to death. If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. So I married someone else and had a child, like girls do. But my heart stayed pinched. Every time I tell the story, people swoon and say it’s dreadfully romantic, but it was horrible and I died halfway through my own story! I don’t know what’s wrong with the living! They think the blackest, most poisonous things are romantic. At least he’s dead now, too. He tries to talk to me but I stick my fingers in my ears until he goes away.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Glass Town Game

“Leftenant Gravey settled his wooden hand kindly on Charlotte’s shoulder. “Don’t let them do that to you, you nor your sister.” How had she never noticed that Gravey had such a lovely Northern accent, so like Tabitha’s? “Let who do what, Leftenant?” “Men. Dazzle you. They do it for advantage, no different from a field marshal gaining the high ground. You do the dazzling. You climb the hill. Or else you’ll be stuck down in the muddy marsh with the rest of us, and that’s no place to be.” “But I don’t know how to dazzle. I couldn’t dazzle a house fern.” Gravey kissed her forehead. He smelled like a warm autumn bonfire sparkling away. “Learn fast,” he said.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Glass Town Game

“In every society there are inequities, and in America the most obvious of these affect people of color and the poor. Demagogues recruit by uniting a disenchanted element against an enemy, then promising to use religion or politics or a combination of the two to bring about rightful change.”
― Jeff Guinn, The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

“If you’re some stranger who stumbled over this book by chance—perhaps rotting in some foreign garbage pile or locked in a dusty traveling trunk or published by some small, misguided press and shelved mistakenly under Fiction—I hope to every god you have the guts to do what needs doing. I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.

But that’s not really why I wrote this, of course.
I wrote it for you. So that you might read it and remember the things you were told to forget.

Now at least you can look clear-eyed into your own future, and choose: stay safe and sane at home, as any rational man would—I swear I’ll understand—

Or run away with me toward the glimmering, mad horizon. Dance through this eternal green orchard, where ten thousand worlds hang ripe and red for the plucking; wander with me between the trees, tending them, clearing away the weeds, letting in the air.

Opening the Doors.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January