Paperclippe

“A warning tone sounded through the drum, echoing with the distance and the free air. An artificial voice reassured them with its tone while it repeated, 'This is an emergency alert. Report to shelters and await official instructions.'

"Listen," Naomi said. "They're playing our song."

"Oh my," Clarissa said, laughing. "We have lived our lives wrong, haven't we?”
― James S.A. Corey, Persepolis Rising

“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

“It was all becoming normal. He could see it in the way the clerk served up the terrible, terrible coffee. He could hear it in the conversations at nearby tables. It showed on the screens and in the gaits of people walking by. Panic and alarm were exhausted too. It was already shifting into its new routine. Checkpoints, yes. Armed security, yes. All the theater of dominance and control and nothing to undercut that narrative.

Just to look at it, you wouldn't guess there'd been a bombing.

Saba hadn't known it was coming either, and they'd only heard about it through him. A small explosion, but the unofficial reports said at least one Laconian had been killed. The official reports, apparently, were that it hadn't happened at all. That was a change. The assassination attempt had been used to justify the crackdown. Now the crackdown was just another day, and highlighting the attacks on the structures of power wasn't useful. Nothing had to be justified anymore. Governor Singh in his offices was trying to project a sense of normalcy and inevitability. And as far as Holden could tell, it was working.

"Kind of quiet," he said, meaning, 'They think they're winning.'

Naomi tugged her hair down over her eyes. "Right?" she said. It meant, 'I think they're winning too.”
― James S.A. Corey, Persepolis Rising

“Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist