User Profile

But words are an essential way of thinking. And books keep the words true.

— Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. Le Guin (Hainish Cycle, #7)

A room is a sort of narrative. The passage in and out of a room, the constraints of action within it. What is moved and what is left alone. The composition of the shape of a person superimposed against the frame of the built environment. Once, clever men—mostly men—dreamed that the frame within which people dwelled might prescribe their behavior. Their ways of loving, their ways of working. Their interdependence or solitude. All purpose-built, all shaped. Those men tended to be wrong. They did not consider the superposition of frame. A room is a sort of narrative when an intelligence moves through it, makes use of it or is constrained by it. Otherwise it is in abeyance. And an intelligence has its own designs.

— Rose/House by Arkady Martine

The watersheds could join in our own time, once we truly understood ecosystem management—not what made a world minimally functional, but what made it beautiful and wild, a worthy dance partner to a species grown worthy in return.

— A Half-Built Garden (Page 274)

My name is Commander Zkog, and my pronoun is she, and you’re all my prisoners.

— Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders (Unstoppable, #1)

"Because it seems to me that the fact that you’re here, enjoying an English education, is precisely what makes the English superior. Unless there’s a better language institute in Calcutta?"

"There’s plenty of brilliant madrasas in India," Ramy snapped. "What makes the English superior is guns. Guns, and the willingness to use them on innocent people."

— Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution