light-of-dove

[light-of-dove]

It was so obvious now that he was not, and could never be, a person in his father’s eyes. No, personhood demanded the blood purity of the European man, the racial status that would make him Professor Lovell’s equal. Little Dick and Philippa were persons. Robin Swift was an asset, and assets should be undyingly grateful they were treated well at all.

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, R. F. Kuang

[light-of-dove]

It’s funny all of people fitted in and out my life suddenly. Absent on the list, they may as well not exist. But I keep thinking about them, really, more and more and all the time.

The Torn Skirt, Rebecca Godfrey

[light-of-dove]

What was happening now had happened before. This was the second serving of mother and daughter. The tape was playing in a loop.

Educated, Tara Westover

[light-of-dove]

“Men live by rules they've made for themselves. And among those rules is one specifying that women are merely commodities for men to possess. A daughter belongs to her father, a wife to her husband. A woman's own desires present obstacles for men and are best ignored.”

- Natsuo Kirino’s ‘Grotesque.’

[light-of-dove]

"I'll never know anyone's true self, will I? Their thoughts and memories, the selfness of someone, the me-ness of me: that's like a true name, a person in all their formless awesome grandeur. But we do not see that grandeur. We see each only in the shapes we are forced to assume. Words constrain us, and also our laws, and our fears and hopes, and the wind, and the rain, and the dog that barks while we're trying to speak, all these things constrain us."

Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant

[light-of-dove]

the hunt

[light-of-dove]

How dare he speak of her. How dare he speak of lost children when he made a choice to lose his, when I would have taken my own life a thousand times over to save her. I would've undertaken all his labors without blinking for even a chance of saving mine, when he did them to forget his.

Herc, Phoenicia Rogerson

[light-of-dove]

[…] a memory he still flinched from, a morally repugnant act, an act so shameful he could not bear to be the person who had done it, so he had eventually needed to be someone else. Was that the worst thing he’d ever done, planted that Judas kiss on his father’s cheek while his mother bled, taken the worthless coin of his father’s affection?

Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill

[light-of-dove]

You are not, as you think, omniscient. You did not know everything; you certainly do not know me. You judge and pronounce; you are ‘never wrong’. I do not argue with you. I simply watch you, knowing what I know. Knowing what you do not know.

Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively

[light-of-dove]

We want to say he died like a hero. We want to say he was brave until the end. And maybe he was. Maybe he was. But he was also just a kid. He was a scared kid who died far from home, in a country that wasn’t his, a country that took his blood and his weight and his tears and didn’t give him back to us

We Are Not Free, Traci Chee

[light-of-dove]

“Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feelings,” she used to say. “Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact?”

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie

[light-of-dove]

“More than a hundred years,” my grandfather says, “and we’re still fighting for the free life we’re supposed to be living.”

Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson