1
Our private tastes in books showed a hint of our secret selves.Nova Ren Suma
2
Maybe, long ago, we used to be good. Maybe all little girls are good in the beginning.Nova Ren Suma
3
It's not a silly pursuit to read beyond what's handed to you, to seek out new voices and leap over the usual books everyone's already talking about and see what you can find on your own. Making definitive choices about what we spend our time on as readers can make a statement, a difference. We can lift other writers up, give space and attention to more voices than the ones that already have all the space and attention. There is power in what we choose to consume as readers, and there is power in what we choose to amplify, celebrate, and share. .Nova Ren Suma
4
The point is, every book we had could save us in a different way -- only, we had to open it. We had to drop our eyes to the page and drink in the words that were there.Nova Ren Suma
5
The story you choose to tell isn't always the story you believe.Nova Ren Suma
6
They forgot who she was: Something fantastic we could never explain. Someone better and bolder than every one of us. Someone to paint murals and build bridges for. Someone worth every ounce of our love. Someone powerful, but in the end not powerful enough.Nova Ren Suma
7
Sometimes a perfect memory can be ruined if put to words.Nova Ren Suma
8
I knew that just because people on the outside were free and clean, it didn’t mean they were the good ones.Nova Ren Suma
9
My own drawing was a house made of books, but where there should have been a door, there was a book, and where there should have been windows, there were books, and where the chimney should have been open to let the smoke out, a book was covering the hole, so if anyone was in the house, they couldn't get out. They'd suffocate, to be found years later, a desiccated corpse still marking its place in the book it had been reading with a knobby finger bone, head caved in by an avalanche of fallen books. As I said, I liked books.Nova Ren Suma
10
I could tell he wanted the best for me. Of course, he assumed that would be getting out. Everyone always thought that, not of what we had to go back to, at home. Maybe our parents had thrown away our mattresses. Maybe they'd told our siblings we'd been run over by trains, to make our absence fonder. Not everyone had a parent. It could be that nothing was waiting for us. Our keys would no longer fit the locks. We'd resort to ringing the bell, saying we've come home, can't we come in? The eye in the peephole would show itself, and that eye could belong to a stranger, as our family had moved halfway across the country and never informed us. Or that eye could belong to the woman who carried us for nine months, who labored for fourteen hours, who was sliced open with a C-section to give us life, and now wished she never did. The juvenile correctional system could let us out into the world, but it could not control who would be out there, willing to claim us.Nova Ren Suma
11
Some of us had been running all our lives. We ran because we could and because we could not. We ran for our lives. We still thought they were worth running for.Nova Ren Suma
12
There's something ugly about a pretty boy who knows he's pretty and assumes everyone else know it too.Nova Ren Suma