Sam > Sam's Quotes

“and a heart that throbs most queerly. I’m queer for other queers, queer for their shapes and colors and sizes, queer for their tastes. I’m queer for the ruthless sea. I’m queer for all the little queer creatures in the tide pools. I’m queer for the light when it breaks the horizon and queer for it when it sinks behind the trees. I’m plain queer for these people and queer for this world. I’m downright queer in love with this wreck of a world, queer in love with love itself—love’s always queer, always arriving in our hearts from queer nowheres, queering everything—and there we are; wide awake all night, queer as queer can be; queer orphans, queer widows, queer boys, and queer girls; sorrel girls queer for ivory boys, daffodil boys queer for lilac girls; carmine girls queer for sable girls, cinnamon boys so very queer for boys of bluest milk. Wicked shepherds! Burn me at the stake and hang me from a tree. Clap me in the stocks; send me down the mine; set me in the burning fields. But I am queer. And I say, Here is water, bread, a dull penny. Here’re my old shirt, my plane and hammer, a roof I’ll help you raise above your head. Here is my queer old body, in a barn, behind a hedge, beneath a shadow, on a bare pallet—”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Sometimes, at the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.”
― Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I'm Worthless

“Fascism, like desire, is scattered everywhere, in separate bits and pieces, within the whole social realm; it crystallizes in one place or another, depending on the relationships of force. It can be said of fascism that it is all-powerful and, at the same time, ridiculously weak.”
― Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I'm Worthless

“I have to know that there are people who would understand if I talked to them. I have to know. I have to believe that my trauma is relatable, if controversial, that there are people who would listen to me and go, it’s okay Alice, it’s completely okay. You are so fucking normal. Everything you’ve experienced is normal.”
― Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I'm Worthless

“We are shaped not by what is strong in us but by the anomaly, by whatever is weak and not accepted.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium

“Solange ich schreibe, spreche ich zwar nicht, aber ich schweige auch nicht.”
― Kim de l'Horizon, Blutbuch

“Ich wollte kein Gegenstand sein, ich wollte ein Mensch sein und gross; und gross zu sein, bedeutete, ein Geschlecht zu haben, ein männliches. Als Frau drohte einem, ein Gegenstand zu bleiben oder ein Ozean zu werden. Das wollte ich nicht.”
― Kim de l'Horizon, Blutbuch

“I prefer to speak in metaphor: That way, no logic can trap me, and no rule can bind me, and no fact can limit me or decide for me what’s possible.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“I can’t help but think back on the feathery flatness of my owl-lover’s embrace, and to compare my two great loves. My owl-lover had a manly lack of mammaries, but otherwise she was all woman. I used to love the way she could flex her feathers separately, moving her feathers across my skin like a thousand soft feather-fingers.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“It is not simply that the alt-right hates diversity in cinema: they’re offended by the idea that nonwhite people might exist in other possible worlds.”
― Jordan S. Carroll, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right

“Freedom granted by your rulers is just a chain with a little slack.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“Her fury had nothing else to eat and so it began to eat her.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“I have committed a terrible crime,” she said, voice firm, controlled, machined to a polish. “So terrible that I feel I can do anything, commit any sin, betray any trust, because no matter what ruin I make of myself, it cannot be worse than what I have already done.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“You can’t go home.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Because it’s gone.” Aminata frowned, finished her drink, and nodded. “You can’t find it again. Even if you go back, it’s not there anymore. That’s history, that’s how it works! Someone’s always changing someone else.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“It is a small thing, yes, but on small things hinge the turning of the world. Very rarely does the opportunity come to stand up against torture and evildoing - or for justice and equality - in the grand gestures most of us dream of. On the other hand, the opportunity to stand up against a small injustice, or for a small truth or a small good, comes nearly every day.”
― Victoria Goddard, The Hands of the Emperor

“I suppose we always hope that those closest to us can see into our hearts—but unless we invite them, or show them in words or deeds, how can they?”
― Victoria Goddard, The Hands of the Emperor

“..you can't just break through a person's defenses like thatl the defenses are a part of the person, they are the person. It's our nature to have hidden depths. It's like...skinning a frog and saying, 'Now I understand this frog, because I've seen what's inside it.' But when you skin it, it dies. You haven't understood a frog, you've understood a corpse.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“We are a machine made by God to write poetry to glorify his creatures. But we're a bad machine, built on an off day. While we were grinding out a few pathetic verses, we killed the creatures we were writing about; for every person writing poems there were a hundred, a thousand, out blowing away God's creation left right and center.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“I had recognized her. They had tried to tear her out, but she had lived in me--deep in my heart and secret, nameless and indescribable, yet never entirely gone. She had been a face in the window of every departing train, a form seen from the back on every crowded street, always just out of my sight, always turning away. And I had known her when she came to me, though I could not say it, and though the very thought had sent my mind skidding across the ice into unconsciousness.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“I want to tell you that it's horrible. I want to tell you that being suppressed makes every moment of existence a torment, because maybe that would help--but it would be a lie. In fact, the most horrible thing is how easy it is to slide into contentment, how hard it is to nourish anger or regret. If you lose the sense of smell, say, or taste, you'd grieve for it; but if you were born without that sense, you'd never miss it. That's how it was for me--the sense was gone, as though it has never been. For the first few years after suppression, I kept myself in misery by sheer effort of will, trying to imagine, every day, what it was that I had lost. But in the end, it became to much trouble. I gave in to the inevitable. I forgot.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“(I loved her name. I couldn't help it. I would release a worm to write her name in every angular gyrus from here to Thailand. I would convert her name to salts, to textures, to the image of a fern in biosonar. I had never heard a name so beautiful, though it was not a name that suited her - it was far too soft a name for her precise young features - and though I thought it much the lovelier when sharpened by my Leningrader accent.)”
― cameron reed, The Fortunate Fall