Diala AlAbed

“I didn’t want to enjoy the way the wind spun around me and pulled at my dress. It soothed me and I didn’t want to be soothed.”
― Bryn Greenwood, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

“You are rich. You own. We are poor. We lack. You have. We do not have. Everything is beautiful here, only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces. The men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels. There you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit, because our men and women are free possessing nothing. They are free. And you, the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail, each alone, solitary with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes, the wall, the wall.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“To many, I was myth incarnate, the embodiment of a most superb legend, a fairy tale. Some considered me a monster, a mutation. To my great misfortune, I was once mistaken for an angel. To my mother, I was everything. To my father, nothing at all. To my grandmother, I was a daily reminder of loves long lost. But I knew the truth—deep down, I always did.
I was just a girl.”
― Leslye Walton, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

“His expression is an open book to me, because I took the time to learn the language many years ago.”
― Cristin Terrill, All Our Yesterdays