38 Quotes by Akwaeke Emezi
"You don’t want to give us a chance to prevent the monsters; you want to wait until the monsters are full-grown and rampaging, so you and the rest of your kind can swoop in and hunt them and save the day. Except that people, kids, are going to get hurt your way. But you don’t care, right? As long as you have something to hunt. You don’t care if people get hurt. I think that makes you more of the monster."
"People want to be the ones drawing the lines, building the boxes, making the names. Maybe because stories live inside all those structures, and if you're the one controlling the stories, then you're the one in power. So they get really angry when you name yourself, especially if you're the type of thing they were expecting to name."
"We understood what was necessary -humans often fail at listening, as if their stubbornness will convince the truth to change, as if they have that kind of power. They do, however, understand forceful things, cruelties--they obey those."
"Ikept the book for the title, for how it was spelled. Beautyful. I had no idea why that spelling was chosen, but I liked it because it kept the beauty intact. It wasn’t swallowed, killed off with an i to make a whole new word. It was solid; it was still there, so much of it that it couldn’t fit into a new word, so much fullness. You got a better sense of exactly what was causing that fullness. Beauty. I wanted to be as whole as that word."
"If you release the idea of the essential self, throw it naked into the surf and let the sea carry it away, then everything changes. Without it, masks take on a new expanse of possibility. They can conceal, yes, but as the magician says, they can also clarify what is true - in precisely the same way a story can tell you something better than stark facts ever could."
"I'm not what anyone thinks I am. I never was. I didn't have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. It didn't even exist to them. So: If nobody sees you, are you still there?"
"There is something bright and brilliant in me. It doesn't make me feel special. It makes me terribly alone."