How Long 'til Black Future Month?

Who is to say plutonium is more powerful than, say, rice? One takes away a million lives, the other saves a hundred times as many.

Everyone—even the poor, even the lazy, even the undesirable—can matter. Do you see how just the idea of this provokes utter rage in some? That is the infection defending itself … because if enough of us believe a thing is possible, then it becomes so.

It is so easy to have principles. Far, far harder to live by them.

What good does it do to be valuable, if nobody values you?

This is the paradox of tolerance, the treason of free speech: we hesitate to admit that some people are just fucking evil and need to be stopped.

And so this is Um-Helat: a city whose inhabitants, simply, care for one another. That is a city’s purpose, they believe—not merely to generate revenue or energy or products, but to shelter and nurture the people who do these things.

He is older, crueler, more experienced, perhaps stronger, but survival has never really been the province of the fittest. Merely the hungriest.

...for without contrasts, how does one appreciate the different forms that joy can take?

All you know is what they've told you, and they tell you so little. They think if we don't know anything, they'll be able to keep control-and they're right. How can you want something you've never seen, don't have the words for, can't imagine?

[...] I'm still hungry and tired all the time, scared all the time, never safe. What good does it do to be valuable, if nobody values you?

How much I’ve had to fight my own internalized racism in addition to that radiating from the fiction and the business. How terrifying it’s been to realize no one thinks my people have a future. And how gratifying to finally accept myself and begin spinning the futures I want to see.

Does that seem wrong to you? It should not. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by those concealing ill intent, of insisting that people already suffering should be afflicted with further, unnecessary pain. This is the paradox of tolerance, the treason of free speech: we hesitate to admit that some people are just fucking evil and need to be stopped.

People don' need no monster to make 'em do evil-hearted shit. All it take is a brown face, or somebody wearin' old tore-up clothes.

So many of our leaders are weak, and choose to take power from others rather than build strength in themselves. And then, having laid claim to what they have not earned, they wonder why everything around them spirals into chaos.

And indeed, they are horrified at what they hear through the speakers, see on the screens. They begin to perceive that ours is a world where the notion that some people are less important than others has been allowed to take root, and grow until it buckles and cracks the foundations of our humanity. “How could they?” the gleaners exclaim, of us. “Why would they do such things? How can they just leave those people to starve? Why do they not listen when that one complains of disrespect? What does it mean that these ones have been assaulted and no one, no one, cares? Who treats other people like that?” And yet, even amid their shock, they share the idea. The evil … spreads.

A small taste of respect for those who needed it so badly, so that they might come to crave it and eventually seek it for themselves.

The days which bracketed hurricanes were painful in their clarity, sharp edge clouds, blue sky hard as a cop's eyes.

Some wings are organza stitched onto school backpacks; some are quilted cotton stuffed with dried flowers and clipped to jacket shoulders. Some few have been carefully glued together from dozens of butterflies’ discarded wings—but only those butterflies that died naturally, of course. Thus adorned, children who can run through the streets do so, leaping off curbs and making whooshing sounds as they pretend to fly. Those who cannot run instead ride special drones, belted and barred and double-checked for safety, which gently bounce them into the air. It’s only a few feet, though it feels like the height of the sky.

I wanted someone to talk to who would not think me strange; someone who would look at me and not think, How do I control such a woman?

I notice that many of my stories are about accepting differences and change … and very few are about fighting threats from elsewhere.

Great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn.

We went through all this for dreams?” Zo asked, frustration creeping into her voice. She wasn’t smiling anymore. “What good are those?” “What good are they to humans?” “They aren’t any good. Humans are full of interesting-but-useless features. Crying. Wisdom teeth. Dreams are more of the same.

Here, here is my hand. Take it. Please. Good. Good. Now, Let's get to work.

He has made his fellow citizens happier, and there is no finer virtue by the customs of this gentle, rich land.

It takes two to tango, but only one to seriously fuck up some shit, as they say in her ‘hood.

Now I am bolder, and angrier, and more joyful; none of these things contradict each other.

ours is a world where the notion that some people are less important than others has been allowed to take root, and grow until it buckles and cracks the foundations of our humanity.

The harbingers of the enemy will hide among the city’s parasites. Beware of them.

All those rural people who hate cities are afraid of something legit; cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a tear in the fabric of reality, like … like black holes, maybe. Yeah.

people there have not wasted themselves on crushing one another into submission, and this makes a remarkable difference.