skadoosh

“There is a way the truth hits you, both hard and gentle at the same time. It punches you in the stomach as it puts its loving arm around your shoulder. Yes, I am terrible to behold, the truth says. But you suspected it all along, didn't you? And isn't better, now that you know? Now, at least, it all makes sense.”
― Anne Ursu, The Real Boy

“But that's how memory works," Bitterblue said quietly. "Things disappear without your permission, then come back again without your permission." And sometimes they came back incomplete and warped.”
― Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue

“But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“I’d rather spend the rest of my life without ever seeing you again,” he says, “than watch them destroy you because of me.”
― Sangu Mandanna, The Lost Girl