Ananda

“I am his puzzle and he is my lock, and it's an arms race to solve the other first. But somewhere in all the knots and twists and trapdoors, he turned to an arsonist, leaving his embers in my veins, smoke on my tongue, a fire burning softly in my heart. And it will not die easy.”
― Margaret Owen, Little Thieves

“He loved to eat candy while he read, and lots of his favorite books at home had brown smudges on the corners of the pages.”
― John Bellairs, The House with a Clock in Its Walls

“Being biracial is being tied to places, people, and a history that wouldn't have welcomed me.”
― Tasha Jun, Tell Me the Dream Again: Reflections on Family, Ethnicity, and the Sacred Work of Belonging

“The most difficult stories about the Khmer Rouge are the ones over which hover almost and maybe. She almost made it, but dysentery took her at the end. He is maybe buried in the mass grave at Choeung Ek, so we will pay our respects there. He almost walked all the way to Thailand, but the cadres found him in the forest. She maybe saw her infant son one last time before she was taken. Anne Spencer almost made it off those wards. After I read the email, an ancient and exuberant terror blazed through me. It was partly the terror that had grown in me alongside my very bones, knowing as I did that I only existed because my mother had outrun almost; I don’t know at what point you stop feeling the need to run, generation by generation, when you’re born after that. But it was also a wonderful, simple, human terror. The one where death brushes too close to you and you abruptly remember what an insane gift it is to be alive, and how much you’d like to stay alive even when death is laughing at your window, laughing in your mirror.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time