Beatrice

“There is such a thing as evil in this world,” Elias told her quietly. “It does not help to look away from it. It does not even help, necessarily, to look at it.” His fingers brushed through her hair, and she shivered. “But sometimes, when you cannot force the world to come to its senses, you must settle only for wiping away some of the small evils in front of you.”
― Olivia Atwater, Half a Soul

“The west you talk about doesn’t exist. It’s a fairytale, a fantasy you sell yourself because the alternative is to admit that you are the least important character in your own story. You invent an entire world because your conscience demands it, you invent good people and bad people and you draw a neat line between them because your simplistic morality demands it. But the two kinds of people in this world are not good and bad, they are engines and fuel. Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be the engines and you will always, always be fuel.”
― Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise

“You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“Readers make their own personal connections to words, irrespective of the writer's intentions, and each reader gains something unique.”
― Michiko Aoyama, What You Are Looking for Is in the Library