Nina

“It occurs to me to dwell on what a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I. An action and an equal and opposite reaction. My viney-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia. We both know it’s nothing so simple, any more than a letter’s reply is its opposite. But which egg preceded what platypus? The ends don’t always resemble our means.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt. I can hide in words so long as I scatter them through my body; to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“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