Sara Sams

“I wanted to yell at the television like Mama and Papa, but I had to learn how to properly do it. I gathered that being a mouse was better than being a mosquita muerta, and being a snake was better than being a man, because flies pretending to be dead could be crushed, mice were shy, and men were persecuted; but everybody always avoided snakes.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“One can appear (one is expected to appear) to be querying, to be turning around and examining the idea, but this little dance is a dance of appeasement, designed to silence any feeling that one’s thinking is pat.”
― Louise Glück, American Originality: Essays on Poetry

“You think that the world we live in is ordinary. We make noise and static to fill the empty spaces where ghosts live. We let other people grow our food, bleach our clothes. We seal ourselves in, clean the dirt from our skins, eat of animals whose blood does not stain our hands. We long ago left the ways of our ancestors, oracles and blood sacrifice, traffic with the spirit world, listening for the voices out of stones and trees. But maybe sometimes you have felt the uncanny, alone at night in a dark wood, or waiting by the edge of the ocean for the tide to come in. We have paved over the ancient world, but that does not mean we have erased it.”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“This wasn’t about truth at all. The court didn’t want truth, the king didn’t want truth. Any truth I could give them, they could ignore as easily as the rest. It wouldn’t change their minds.”
― Naomi Novik, Uprooted