N.K.Jemisin

Death was always here. Death is you.

“Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Tell them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at these contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they’ll break themselves trying for what they’ll never achieve.”

The people we love are the ones who hurt us the most, after all.”

“Be still, and be brave. I’m going to break your hand now.”

“Children are the undoing of us,”

The world is not fair, and sometimes it makes no sense.

“My—oh, that one. Moving the way we do is hard for them, so they’ve got their own ways of getting about. Including ways I would never have guessed.”

pain is what shapes us

“So you’re a stone eater,” you say.

He nods, solemn.

You’ve only seen that kind of attitude, and this kind of comm-wide acceptance of it, once before.