The alef, the glyphs, what's here, or what we're really looking for

On what goes on with an alef:

"'It says you’re my cousin,' said Little Ash, quite pleased with himself. 'And your name is Uriel Federman. See here, your eyes are brown and you’re a man. Like a human person. And you’re a Jew, of course.'

The angel took the papers back. The rest of the letters it did not understand, but Uriel at least was written as it would be in Hebrew. It was not sure how it felt about having such a thing as a name attached to itself. A single, solid name, that is, written in the letters with which the whole world was once written. There was something about the alef at the beginning that made it feel a little dizzy. You never quite knew what was going on with an alef."

— Sacha Lamb. When the Angels Left the Old Country. Levine Querido, 2022.

How the glyphs talk:

"Babuta say to the man, Watch me now, no man here ever wished to read, and the man say, You will know when you see the glyphs, for the glyphs talk like the world."

— Marlon James. Black Leopard, Red Wolf. New York: Riverhead, 2019. Chapter 17.

Is it already here?

"What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, in experiments and possibilities."

— Ruth Wilson Gilmore, quoted as the epigraph to Destiny Hemphill's motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life

On what you're really looking for:

"Upon arrival, the soldiers took me to a side area, where a chaplain came by to see me. 'Do you need spiritual help?' he asked. I couldn’t think of anything I desired less in that moment. What I really wanted was a cheeseburger..."

— Chelsea Manning, ReadMe.txt. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.