Beth James

“When the moon was full, my mother would burn sandlewood incense throughout her flat with the windows closed. Kali Mata had told her to do this to vanquish evil spirits and mosquitoes. We stopped the practice for a year when the doctor said it was giving me asthma. Ma believes that was the year everything went wrong.”
― Avni Doshi, Burnt Sugar

“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“I want it and I do not want it. I want to be visible and I want to be invisible, or perhaps I want to be visible to some people and not to others. It seems unfair that I can't choose.”
― Jessica Andrews, Saltwater

“In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous