Megan Hex

“All of that requires that they do what you’re talking about: destroying our empathy and reducing our faith in reason. Those guys on the border laughed when they let you through because you’re not even human to them. You’re a unit of something else. They rename you ‘test subject’ or ‘enemy,’ or they assign you a race or a nation or a class—and then they don’t have to think about you anymore.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, The Loop

“If she asked Father Josiah, he would tell her to ask for forgiveness for Abu Zaidoun—she never would. If she asked God or Saint George the Martyr or the ghost of her son, they would tell her she didn’t need to ask forgiveness for Abu Zaidoun. She was fully entitled to seek revenge because it would strengthen her faith and give her ailing spirit the energy it needed to keep on living.”
― Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad

“We put our feet on the hard ground, take in the night air and look around as if this whole place has sprung up for us and us alone. Not just the house, but the ancient trees, the watching insects, the stars and even the moon. But they have all lived without us for lifetimes that make our own look like the blink of the eye. The house, with its strict walls and severe lines, is shamefully out of place, something modern dropped down somewhere as soft as feathers, as twisty and spreading as willow roots. How do the trees and the insects and the stars and the moon like it, I wonder? How do they like to have to share their secret lives with us now?”
― Hester Fox, The Witch of Willow Hall: A Chilling Gothic Mystery of Haunted Houses and Ancient Magic

“It was hard to venture back near the place you’d been bred without settling into the characteristics of the person you’d been there.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box