Stephanie

“History is not dead. We have not moved on. Like Minnow and many of my other characters, I love this country because it is my home, and my parents’ home, and my grandparents’ home, and because I was raised to believe in the opportunity and equality America promises, but this does not prevent me from seeing its problems, seeing all the ways it has failed its people again and again.”
― Traci Chee, We Are Not Free

“Years later, the trauma of those experiences continued to haunt me. Most Japanese Americans from my parents' generation didn't like to talk about the internment with their children. As with many traumatic experiences, they were anguished by their memories and haunted by shame for something that wasn't their fault. Shame is a cruel thing. It should rest on the perpetrators but they don't carry it the way the victims do.”
― George Takei, They Called Us Enemy

“To tell you the truth, I don't get how we can almost unanimously agree that murder is wrong, yet when it comes to rape some people still see shades of gray.”
― Megan Goldin, The Night Swim

“Gaman. The ability to hold your pain and bitterness inside you and not let them destroy you. To make something beautiful through your anger, or with your anger, and neither erase it nor let it define you. To suffer. And to rage. And to persevere.”
― Traci Chee, We Are Not Free