A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1)

by Arkady Martine

A MIND is a sort of star-chart in reverse: an assembly of memory, conditioned response, and past action held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signaling, rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness.

Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.

“No one is dead,” Mahit said carefully, “who is remembered.”