Nina

“I keep turning away from speaking of your letter. I feel--to speak of it would be to contain what it did to me, to make it small.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“But why? Red has done what she came to do, she thinks. But wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time. One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet. Or her child does, or a smuggler she trades jackets with in some distant spaceport. And all this blood for nothing.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“She wears antique typewriter keys on her fingertips in veneration of the great god Hack,”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This is How You Lose the Time War