K.C.

“The word genocide is clinical, overly general, bloodless, and dehumanizing.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“It’s strange, how you go from being a person who is away from home to a person with no home at all.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“Pete realized that to Pearl, Satan had staged the world in this and every ancient particular. Pete imagined what it would feel like to believe such a thing, to see the very Devil ranging about the Earth like an art director, crafting fictions in the schists and coal seams and limestone. All to cast doubt on the Bible’s timeline. All for the harvest of lost souls. Maybe it would be worth it for the Devil. You could almost picture it. Almost. You could almost believe a book more real than the real, more actual and relevant than terra firma and all the dull laws that govern it. “You know, Jeremiah,” Pete said, “if I believed the things you did, I’d act at least as batshit as you do.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“When he first got put on a train to the school, after his mother announced she would be leaving to do her missionary work, just weeks after the night his father left for ceremony and never came back, the roar of the train was so loud he thought there was something coming out of his ears, so he held his hands against them and tried not to think of an iron horse carrying them inside it, him and Opal and the rest of the children off to an iron world, where everything was too hard to not end up hardening them, and too heavy to not end up crushing them.”
― Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars