Maggie

“But you still know about Doors, don't you? Because there are ten thousand stories about ten thousand Doors, and we know them as well as we know our names. They lead to Faerie, to Valhalla, Atlantis and Lemuria, Heaven and Hell, to all the directions a compass could never take you, to elsewhere. My father--who is a true scholar and not just a young lady with an ink pen and a series of things she has to say--puts it much better: "If we address stories as archaeological sites, and dust through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments where the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“If you’re some stranger who stumbled over this book by chance—perhaps rotting in some foreign garbage pile or locked in a dusty traveling trunk or published by some small, misguided press and shelved mistakenly under Fiction—I hope to every god you have the guts to do what needs doing. I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.

But that’s not really why I wrote this, of course.
I wrote it for you. So that you might read it and remember the things you were told to forget.

Now at least you can look clear-eyed into your own future, and choose: stay safe and sane at home, as any rational man would—I swear I’ll understand—

Or run away with me toward the glimmering, mad horizon. Dance through this eternal green orchard, where ten thousand worlds hang ripe and red for the plucking; wander with me between the trees, tending them, clearing away the weeds, letting in the air.

Opening the Doors.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Hate is loud, but I think you'll learn it's because it's only a few people shouting, desperate to be heard. You might not ever be able to change their minds, but so long as your remember you're not alone, you will overcome.”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“From the famed but ethically bankrupt experiments of Harry Harlow, to the excruciating testimonies of refugees and concentration camp survivors, science and history are replete with the mind-shattering and life-altering impacts of psychological trauma. For carnivores, the story is eerily similar. With drastic losses of habitat, a constant threat from hunters, high mortality, and unreliable food sources, life for the average carnivore has changed dramatically and rapidly from historic norms. Under highly stressful physical or emotional conditions (food deprivation, decreased habitat, loss of one's mother, social disruption), species-normative brain processes are compromised. What goes around on the outside, comes around on the inside. Each unusual change in the environment telegraphs directly into the brain and body, altering the organism's inner blueprint. These neuroepigenetic changes then are expressed as variations in personality, stress regulation, and immunological resilience. The result is a puma who is not quite a puma.”
― G.A. Bradshaw, Carnivore Minds: Who These Fearsome Animals Really Are