The void is my friend.
“I wish I knew how the Queen was still alive, when the real one’s dead. I mean she told me how she ‘woke up,’ but it sounded like a fairy tale.”
page 282, Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
“After all this, you don’t believe in fairy tales?”
It’s not an exaggeration to say that tuberculosis became a form of racialized violence. In Canada and the United States, for example, many Indigenous children were removed from their homes and forced to attend residential schools. As early as 1907, experts were sounding the alarm that this project seemed “almost as if the prime conditions for the outbreak of epidemics had been deliberately caused.” The death rate from TB in Canada’s residential schools appears genuinely unprecedented in human history.
page 85, Chapter 9: Not a Person, Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
The problem is, if we need fiction to teach us empathy, we don’t really have empathy, because empathy is not a one-stop destination; it’s a practice, ongoing, which requires work from us in our daily lives–not just when we’re confronted with the visibly and legibly Other. Not just when a particularly gifted author has managed to make a community’s story come alive for the reader who’s come for a quick zoo visit, always remaining on her side of the cage.
page 30, How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo
They say that trees that grow against cliffsides are tortured, seeds brought there on a wayward breeze and forced to put down roots into stone and salt. They must twist their trunks up at an unnatural angle to accommodate the doomed circumstances they’d been given at birth. Yet they still fight to survive, contort themselves to stretch their branches up to the sun. They grow and grow sideways like this until the day a storm finally tears their bodies apart. And yet, hadn’t they lived wild and free? Weren’t they happy, when they were here?
page 418, Red City by Marie Lu
Can’t we be?
Are we still two kids who need each other?
All I think about is you. You are my beginning and end.
