“You are Insignificant. One of millions, neither special nor unique. I did not ask for this ignominy, and I resent the comparison. Fine. I don't you like you, either.”

“...and when I lift my head to scream out my fury, a million stars turn black and die. No one can see them, but they are my tears.”

“You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I tire of your whining.”

“Throughout my life as I’ve sought to become a published writer of speculative fiction, my strongest detractors and discouragers have been other African Americans. These were people who had, like generations before them, bought into the mythology of racism: black people don’t read. Black people can’t write. Black people have no talents other than singing and dancing and sports and crime. No one wants to read about black people, so don’t write about them. No one wants to write about black people, which is why you never see a black protagonist. Even if you self-publish, black people won’t support you. And if you aim for traditional publication, no one who matters — that is, white people — will buy your work.(A corollary of all this: there is only black and white. Nothing else matters.)Having swallowed these ideas, people regurgitated them at me at nearly every turn. And for a time, I swallowed them, too. As a black woman, I believed I wasn’t supposed to be a writer. Simultaneously I believed I was supposed to write about black people — and only black people. And only within a strictly limited set of topics deemed relevant to black people, because only black people would ever read anything I’d written. Took me years after I started writing to create a protagonist who looked like me. And then once I started doing so, it took me years to write a protagonist who was something different.”

“As for the danger of alienating people with good intentions — well, one of the things that I learned from RaceFail (and also from general experience) was that people with good intentions are the ones to fear most. The overt racists are easy to deal with. You can spot them coming a mile away. But the well-intentioned people are scarier. They might not intend harm, but in most cases they haven’t thought about all the racist (and other “-ist”) messages they’ve absorbed from society. They haven’t done the basic groundwork necessary to purge themselves of that passively-absorbed “-ism”. So they say the most incredibly hurtful, self-absorbed, and utterly useless things, then compound the problem by getting upset when they’re called on it. I liken these people to sleeper agents — they seem OK at first, but then they suddenly “activate” and stab you in the back, and then they come out of their fugue and freak because there’s blood on their hands and they don’t know how it got there and they refuse to accept that they’re the ones who put it there, OMG, OMG. Meanwhile, you’re on the floor bleeding out, unnoticed because of their histrionics.The rage of RaceFail made many of these well-intentioned sleeper agents wake up. So while yes, I think the anger risked alienating some of them, I’m fine with that. They were always dangerous; I haven’t lost anything by their alienation. The ones who wake up are a gain (or they will be, once they shift from “not causing harm” anymore to “actually trying to help”).”

“The Nightlord cannot be controlled, child. He can only be unleashed. And you asked him not to kill.”

“Whether you live or die is irrelevant. You are Arameri, and like all of us, you will serve.”