Maya

“We said in our introduction that man was an affirmation. We shall never stop repeating it. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a negation. No to man's contempt. No to the indignity of man. To the exploitation of man. To the massacre of what is most human in man: freedom.”
― Franz Fanon

“For a brief moment the flame lit the palimpsest of his face. Then the chiaroscuro died and his face was no longer legible.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“YOUR BULLET CANNOT TOUCH MY HUMANITY! IT CANNOT TOUCH MY SOUL! IT CANNOT RIP MY ROOTS FROM THE SOIL OF THIS LAND YOU COVET! WE WILL NOT LET YOU STEAL OUR LAND!”
― Susan Abulhawa, The Blue Between Sky and Water