Neila

“I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. I only do because I can see how wrong my choices were. Don’t do it like this. Don’t enter believing yourself a node in a grand undertaking, that your past and your trauma will define your future, that individuals don’t matter. The most radical thing I ever did was love him, and I wasn’t even the first person in this story to do that. But you can get it right, if you try. You will have hope, and you have been forgiven. Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“It's not really giving up our freedom to be close with people. Because freedom only exists in relation to other people.”
― Margaret Killjoy, The Barrow Will Send What it May

“She’s staring at me, her face unreadable in the same way a star chart is unreadable when there are no lines to mark the constellations. It’s not that you can’t make out a shape, it’s that you can make out so many shapes you’ll never know which one is right. If I wanted to, I could read longing in her distance. But if I’m honest, it’s probably just my own reflected back by her indifference.”
― Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds