Jeffrey Bustos

“I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside”
― Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I hate the term undocumented. It implies people like my mother and me don't exist without a paper trail. I have a drawer full of diaries and letters I never sent to my grandmother, my father, even to my younger sister that will prove to anyone I am very real, most definitely documented; photos taped to our refrigerator, snapshots taken at the Sandy Hill house or other friends' fiestas, the Sears portraits our mother used to dress up for every year, making us seat on bus seats still as statues so we wouldn't wrinkle to have a perfect picture to send back to her mother. Don't tell me I'm undocumented when my name is tattooed on my father's arms.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“When you leave one country for another, nobody tells you years will bleed together like rain on newsprint. One year becomes five. Five years become ten. Ten years become fifteen. She never thought that when she left on the plane with Maulo, it would be the last time to see her mother in the flesh.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country