Culture Commentary and Miscellaneous Musings
“I think it’s about convenience,” Thomil shot back, “like most mages’ endeavors. It’s much easier to tell yourself you’re a good person than it is to actually be one.”
Chapter 8: Rune Reader, Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang
While the terrible thing is happening–while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed–any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight.
Chapter One: Departure, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar Al-Akkad
“I think it’s better to feel,” Yoyo said, “even if it hurts.”
Chapter 18: Gaechon, Luminous by Silvia Park
On one of my first forays into publishing anything, an editor told me that I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naive to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.
Thick, Tressie McMillan Cottom
True sisterhood, the kind where you grew fingernails in the same womb, were pushed screaming through identical birth canals, is not the same as friendship. You don’t choose each other, and there’s no furtive period of getting to know the other. You’re part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord–tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential–and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread.
Prologue, Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors