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Before Mama died, Haruka's life was a succession of pleasing things, occasionally interrupted by a trivial sadness.
Now, her flesh has been clawed open. The grief does not die. It finds places to fill. It comes in waves. Mostly, it comes at night.

"Please answer this - if I should by accident or the design of god or man produce an infant could I park it in America? - for several years - as it's a hell of a place here for small babies - besides it would bore me stiff - for the first five years - anyway the event isn't very likely."

When you're writing your mother's biography and find this piece of information :)

"Lessa's colours flashed a strange bluish grey, and then disappeared again before Skedi could read the emotion. Irritation? Attraction? Sometimes it was hard to tell with humans.
The colour was, however, not far from the shade of Kissen's eyes."

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“As I moved through puberty, a part of me felt betrayed by my own biology - why did I have to be attracted to boys? I trusted animals so much more than people - I only wanted to love them. When it came to liking another human, I was perplexed as to why I would want to give my attention to something so unknown, so unpredictable.”

"Ik kijk naar Opa's gezicht vol ouderdomsvlekken. Plotseling ben ik jaloers op die dingen. Niet omdat ik ze mooi vind, zoals de wijnvlek van Ellen, maar omdat ik ze nooit zal krijgen."

"Het restaurant was voor ons niet alleen de achtergrond van ons leven, het was de spil en de leden van ons gezin waren slechts ondersteunende factoren. Er was geen ruimte om een gezin te zijn of tijd voor onszelf te hebben. Het restaurant, daar ging het om."

"The point of my scholarship is to understand the Folk. To the extent that we mortals can."
"It has never struck you as a futile endeavour?"
"No more than any other branch of science." I gestured to the sky. "What can mortals learn of the stars, given that we cannot walk among them? Yet we try."

"We kwamen drie bakjes gelatine tekort om iedereen op onze afdeling er een te geven. In gedachten streepte ik mezelf als eerste weg. Daarna ook Higashinakano. Vervolgens ging ik in mijn hoofd na of iemand momenteel niet op kantoor was. Tewijl ik daarover nadacht, vroeg ik iets af: waarom had ik mezelf eigenlijk als eerste geëlimineerd?"

"They have been talking about me, that's obvious. Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they've been eating too much sugar, but actually it's Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus."

The word 'planter' was looping through my head. It sounds so benign, in its original sense of a person who plants bulbs or seeds in the ground. The more sinister second meaning was acquired late in the 16th century: the founder of a colony. By 1619, the colonising work of planters in Virginia had given rise to a third and more specific meaning: the owner of a plantation.

"Let your movement try to come for me, I won't go", Aran continued. "And none of them - none of you - can make me. I know what you all did. Massacring people from other groups, even your own batchmates and friends. Periannai died. But do you think those boys the movement killed were not other people's brothers?"

“Rich people, thought Judy - she thought this then, and she thinks it now - generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.”

"Memories never come at predictable moments. They're like cats that sleep peacefully in the sun, but when you dare to rub their bellies, they scratch you right in the eyes."

"Zeus greets her as virgo Iove digna - a virgin worthy of Jove. These are words to strike fear into the heart of any girl who doesn't wish to be assaulted by the king of the gods.

This again proves that the biggest threat to any mortal woman in Ancient Greece isn't war or illness, but Zeus and his libido 💀

Fitz: "I've only had Smithy for a day and a half, but if anything happened to him, I would kill everyone in this room and then myself."

"Haar naam was Virginia Fur, ze had meterslange manen en joekels van handen met vuile nagels. Toch werd ze door de bergbewoners gerespecteerd en zij toonde ook altijd eerbied voor hun gebruiken. Toegegeven, het volk daarboven bestond uit planten, dieren en vogels. Natuurlijk moest ze weleens een belediging van de katten incasseren, maar ze beledigde hen in dezelfde taal net zo luidkeels terug."

What's the closet you've got to giving a good performance?
"You need to rethink your performance each night and hopefully, with a bit of luck, something new will be released, because there's never an end to the array of possibilities, especially with Shakespeare. And I would mistrust any actor who said there was."

"I am an explorer, Wendell. I might call myself a scientist, but that is at the heart of it. I wish to know the unknowable. To see what no mortal has seen, to - how does Lebel put it? To peel back the carpeting of the world and tumble into the stars."

He sucked his teeth and breathed a laugh. "That Jewish guy was scared of you. You're like a ghost to him."
"Me?"
"We haunt them. They want to kill us but we will not die. Even now we've lost nearly everything." His laugh deepened. "Zombie apocalypse."

"Leo keek hoe ik de truien netjes op onze vensterbank stapelde, alsof ons raam een etalage was. Er zitten ook mannentruien, zei ik. Maar hij zei: als er nog meer truien bij komen dan sta ik niet voor mezelf in. Ik begreep niet precies wat hij daarmee bedoelde maar snapte wel dat wat voor de een troostend is voor een ander verstikkend kan zijn."

"Gandhiji had it wrong about some things. When someone threatens your body, you have every right to protect yourself. 'Satyagraha' or passive resistance or whatever may be fine for freedom and salt marches, but not when someone's trying to rape you. You don't have to love the assholes oppressing you, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

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"There was a Geeta before Ramesh's hands had found her, and that Geeta was still alive, and even if no one else was interested in knowing her, Geeta was."

"It's important to have people believe in you and to expect that you're going to succeed. People need to have high expectations for people with disabilities because then they'll give them opportunities to learn and grow. People don't grow in places like Forest Haven and other institutions."

"I'm wondering if you still think of her as a monster. I suppose it depends on what you think that word means. Monsters are, what? Ugly? Terrifying? Gorgons are both these things, certainly, although Medusa wasn't always. Can a monster be beautiful if it still is terrifying?"

"Are you absolutely sure you want to be hit in the head with an axe?" Hera asked. "I think it's a marvellous idea," she said to her son, before turning back to her husband. "But I'm not completely certain it would make your head hurt less."
"I have tried everything else," said Zeus. "Use the axe."

"Persephone was no fool, I realized upon rereading the myth. Aida asleep beside me, her breath sour and sweet. Imagine Persephone for the first time in the absolute intoxication of dark, her senses stretching languid, the cave as moist as lover's breath. The feast, the chair, the plate, the fruit: red. Imagine a story whose moral is mute desire."

"Every time another pale man approaches, I let him know what I am capable of. That I know how to seek mushrooms that grow in the darkest seams of the woods, that I know how to gather them, that I can bring them to his table. I don't say it, but they know it: I know of the running of a house, of a kitchen- I can hide them in his food."

"I'm not going to raise my child to go through life expecting it to be sweet, when for her, it ain't going to be. The sooner she learns to accept what is and what ain't, the better. She get a taste of that sweetness, she's going to want it so bad, she'll grow up and settle for crumbs of it."

"There is a time and place for being normal. For most people, normal is their default setting. But for some, like you and me, normal is something we have to bring out, like putting on a suit for a posh dinner."

Alright Michael, I don't think you are Solitaire, but I highly suspect you of being a psychopath 💀

“This is partly the reason I was traveling in Europe in the winter: so that any photographs taken would be the polar opposite of the tropical tripe that so often gets shoehorned in with black culture. […] I wanted work commutes and the banal humanity of everyday life, which is closer to the reality of the black experience in Europe: we do more than just dance, sing and grin.”