Lena

“P.S. A typo? No, Winnow. I simply forgot to add a footnote, which should have read as: *outshine: transitive verb a. to shine brighter than b. to excel in splendor or showiness You remember how you said that word to me in the infirmary, post-trenches? You believed I had come to the Bluff to outshine you. And I would speak this word back to you now, but only because I would love to see you burn with splendor. I would love to see your words catch fire with mine.”
― Rebecca Ross, Ruthless Vows

“Oh, I would betray you a hundredfold,” he said, his voice rising. “I would betray you a thousandfold for her.”
― Rebecca Ross, Ruthless Vows

“Like my doppelganger projecting all of our surveillance fears on a vaccine app, conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right—the feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden. The word for the system driving those feelings starts with c, but if no one ever taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it’s easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy.”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

“Selena believed, with every fiber of her being, that a person’s worth was not defined by how hard they worked or how productive they managed to be. She also believed just as strongly that this did not apply to her.”
― T. Kingfisher, Snake-Eater