emanu ✧

“There was this one weekend, a million summers ago, when I sat on the shore drinking a frozen limeade, and I realized the only thing I wanted to look at was the way the sun hit the girls swimming in the lake.
The problem has always been this: When I look at you, I taste lime, and I see light on water.”
― Casey McQuiston, I Kissed Shara Wheeler

“Not just me,” Stephen says, looking to Jimmy. “Us. All of us. What we did. What we fought for. Our history. Who we are. They won’t teach it in schools. They don’t want us to have a history. They don’t see us. They don’t know we are another country, with invisible borders, that we are a people. You have to make them see.” Stephen takes a strained breath. “You have to remember it. And to share it. Please. Time passes, and people forget. Don’t let them.”
― Abdi Nazemian, Like a Love Story

“Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“I have become something wonderful, she thought. I have become something terrible. Was she now a goddess or a monster? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War