Finley

“How slender, how fragile, the foundations of an empire. Take away the centre, and what’s left? A gasping periphery, baseless, powerless, cut down at the roots.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“If we push in the right spots - then we've moved things to the breaking point. The the future becomes fluid, and change is possible. History isn't a premed tapestry that we've got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“The wind swoops over the tenements on Orchard Street, where some of those starry-eyed dreams have died and yet other dreams are being born into squalor and poverty, an uphill climb. It gives a slap to the laundry stretched on lines between tenements, over dirty, broken streets where, even at this hour, hungry children scour the bins for food. The wind has existed forever. It has seen much in this country of dreams and soap ads, old horrors and bloodshed. It has played mute witness to its burning witches, and has walked along a Trail of Tears; it has seen the slave ships release their human cargo, blinking and afraid, into the ports, their only possession a grief they can never lose.”
― Libba Bray, The Diviners

“Sometimes I think gravity may be death in disguise. Other times I think gravity is love, which is why love's only demand is that we fall.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants