Kayla B

“she'd never quite stopped feeling like they'd all know she wasn't quite good enough to join them. Now that emotion felt like a vestige of another Mahit entirely, a child-Mahit with a child's fears and desires.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“I carry exile in my heart. It animates my poetry and my politics; I will never be free of it, having lived outside of Teixcalaan for so long. I will always be measuring the distance between myself and a person who remained in the heart of the world; between the person I would have been had I stayed and the person I have become under the pressure of the frontier. When the Seventeenth Legion came through the jumpgate in bight star-snatching ships and filled up the Ebrekti sky in the shapes of my home, I was at first afraid. A profound discontinuity. To know fear in the shape of one's own face.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“If she didn't know better, Mahit could think he was an automation. Even an artificial intelligence had more immediately apparent volition.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“exile happened in the heart and the mind long before it happened to the body”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace