Alphareader - Danielle Binks

When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you're born with, and eventually lose. Everyone under the age of seven is fluent in 'ifspeak'; go hang around with someone under three feet tall and you'll see. What if a giant funnelweb spider crawled out of that hole over your head and bit you on the neck? What if the only antidote for venom was locked up in a vault on the top of a mountain? What if you lived through the bite, but could only move your eyelids and blink the alphabet? It doesn't really matter how far you go; the point is that it's a world of possibility. Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

'My sister's Keeper' Jodi Picoult 

Everything in the world's got a voice; most people don't hear hard enough is all. Sunrise sounds like slow chords dripping from my guitar this morning. Sad chords, in B-flat.

'Chasing Charlie Duskin' by Cath Crowley

And when my body shall cease, my soul will still be yours, Claire? I swear by my hope of heaven, I will not be parted from you." The wind stirred the leaves of the chestnut trees nearby, and the scents of late summer rose up rich around us; pine and grass and strawberries, sun-warmed stone and cool water, and the sharp, musky smell of his body next to mine. "Nothing is lost, Sassenach; only changed." "That's the first law of thermodynamics," I said, wiping my nose. "No," he said. "That's faith.

'Drums of Autumn' by Diana Gabaldon 

Boy you really missed the boat. I'll make it simple, so's even fuckin you can understand. Papa God growed us up till we could wear long pants; then he licensed his name to dollar bills, left some car keys on the table, and got the fuck outta town". Water rushes to his eye-holes. "Don’t be lookin up at no sky for help. Look down here, at us twisted dreamers". He takes hold of my shoulders, spins me around, and punches me towards the mirror on the wall. "You're the God. Take responsibility. Exercise your power

'Vernon God Little' by DBC Pierre

"You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself."

'Breakfast at Tiffany's' by Truman Capote 

When a child first catches adults out - when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgements are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic desolation. The Gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of Gods; they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

'East of Eden' by John Steinbeck

Poem by Palestinian-American poet and reporter, Noor Hindi. What’s happening right now is atrocious and terrifying. Raise up Palestinian voices, listen.