[quotes] When They Call You a Terrorist - Asha Bandele, Patrisse Cullors 2018

  

"This neighborhood, this world, is all I have known, it's what I have loved, despite the hardship I don't really know as hardship because it's how everyone lives."

"And for me, too, it started the year I turned twelve. That was the year that I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready."

"We only know that crack filled the empty spaces for a lot of people whose lives have been emptied out."

"Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities. Poor white people who are chosen to be guards. They run the motels in prison towns where families have to stay when they make 11-hour drives into rural corners of the state."

"Stock in private prisons and companies attached to prisons represents the largest growth industry in the American market as the millennium lurches toward its barbed-wire close."

"In almost every way, Mandela speaking in 1964 at the trial at Rivonia could have been one of our leaders speaking for Los Angeles in 1992, the year of the uprising."

"If we did not die, we could go to prison, where we could work for the State of California and corporate brands we could not afford to buy."

"But so ineffective were these laws [gang statutes] that between 1990 and 2010 in my city, Los Angeles, with the greatest number of injunctions in the state designed, they said, to stop gang activity, 10,000 young people were killed.

"Donna Hill, a simple, single Black woman with a heart that could carry a universe, becomes my first spirit guide, the first and most clear example I have as a young adult of what it means to receive a gift you can only properly show gratitude for by sharing it with others."

"I talk about the politics of personal responsibility, how it's mostly a lie meant to keep you from challenging real-world legislative decisions that chart people's paths, that undo people's lives."

"But now that race isn't written into the law, she says, look for the codes. Look for the coded language everywhere, she says. They rewrote the laws, but they didn't rewrite white supremacy. They kept that shit intact, she says."

"He loves me as is, which is a gift I wish for all of us to receive, the gift of being loved simply because of who you are, not in spite of it, not with condition, not loved in parts."

"How do you measure the loss of what a human being does not receive?"

"In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn't mean you're not doing life."

"How is it possible that the only response we have for poor people who are mentally ill is criminalization? How does this align with the notion of a democratic or free society - to not take care of the least of these?"

"From my neighborhood in LA to the Bay Area to Brooklyn, Black and Brown people have been moved out as young white people build exciting new lives standing on the bones of ours. The drug war as ethnic cleansing."

"I do know that in my heart, the heart dedicated to Black liberation, I love people. Period. I love complicated, imperfect, beautiful people. People, I suppose, like me."

"We want to build a world in which undeveloped and unrefined emotional instincts - like possessiveness and jealousy - are minimized as much as humanly possible so that all eyes, hearts and spirits are not distracted from the goal. And the goal is freedom. The goal is to live beyond fear. The goal is to end the occupation of our bodies and souls by the agents of a larger American culture that demonstrates daily how we don't matter."

"Asset forfeiture allowed law enforcement to seize property simply if they said that they suspected someone of being involved with the drug trade."

"It's hard to be intimate with one person when you're being intimate with the world."

"We think about ways we could co-parent and partner without being married. I like how I feel in the space with JT, both liberated and connected."

"One by one each of us finds a chair - this is why I am barefoot, why we came in barefoot. And one by one almost all of us begin to speak: 
If I die in police custody, know that they killed me.
If I die in police custody, show up at the jail, make noise, protest, tell my mother.
If I die in police custody, tell the entire world: I wanted to live."

"You have the power to shape-shift not only yourselves but the world of the world. You, each one, are endowed with gifts you don't even yet know, and you, each one, are what love and the possibility of a world in which our lives truly matter looks like."

[quotes] The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void - Jackie Wang 2021

 

"By making myself visible I remove the anxiety of being found." - Death as a Survival Technique

"I think, How sad that people are not alive to experience their funerals because it's the most love they'll ever get." - Death as a Survival Technique

"In the end I am no longer able to believe that anyone is 'good', though sometimes people are 'correct.'" - Wounded Adjucation

"It is unclear to me if the flock of people and I are migrating away from the catastrophe or toward a party." - Panic at the Disco

"Though sometimes it takes someone's absence to realize what they mean to you. (This is how the dead get revenge from the grave.)" - Dead Letter Day

"I don't understand what has changed but I know I will never be able to touch you again." - How the Egg Loses Its Shape

"There is a hotel room and before entering I say, 'We have to shed our connection to the world.' At the threshold we leave our phones, computers - everything that binds us to the world so that inside the room it will be... just us." - How to Shed the World 

"That comforts me, to know that what happened will always have happened, that the event is immiscible." - The Death of Thurston Moore

[quotes] Edinburgh - Alexander Chee 2001

 

"Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts. But I know now."

"My science class has taught me that breathing turns the air inside you to a carbon, a little different from smoke, but a little like it. We have this in common with flames."

"Things grow so fast, it is amazing we don't all lie awake at night, listening to it all happen."

"Here I am. Thirteen at last. Someone should kill me now, I think, as I blow out the candles. Before the damage spreads."

"I pick flowers for my mother as I walk. The neighborhood kids call me Nature Boy. I want to die."

"But here they are, and at the sight of them everything evil in me seems to blow away, like dust from the top of a book."

"For no reason I can account for, I am calm, searching myself for panic and not finding it."

"I can see my grandmother, slicing at her cutting board. I can't see what she's cutting, but I can tell she's cooking something for me."

"She sighed, and it sounded like a sigh that had been learned under a different sorrow."

"I'd always prized silence for being the absence of other noises. In this house I come to see how one can prize silence for being articulate, as well."

"I work there with a spade, carting the dirt off to the marsh's edge, my back aching, but the beauty of work is that it builds you while you build."

"You want a romantic attachment to men, but instead, you are attaching romance to things that men do."

"He was entirely internally preoccupied and it mattered not at all what was going on around him unless it had something to do with something he was drawing."

"And that's, well, that's not what this should be about. Love should be about making you want to live."

"How tear, as in to cry, and tear, as in to rip or pull, how they're spelled the same? You could write them and someone reading would not know if you were crying or separating."

"Envy is like, the skin you're in burns. And the salve is someone else's skin."

"How could he love me? There's nothing to me except a place where the light resists moving forward."

"I couldn't make enough, though, on my own, but didn't want to expand the business, and began looking for a way to leave. But of course, the only way to leave is to just leave."

"It wasn't that my life lacked meaning, but rather that I disliked the meaning it offered to me every morning as I sat at my studio wheel, spinning."

"I was not making great art, but I didn't want to, either. I wanted to make lots of things that added little beauties everywhere, on a daily basis."

"My sister's words about love came to me then: When it's right, she said, you don't have to have a committee meeting about it."

"Bridey and I had been faithful, another expression. I like to think of it as attentive. We were and are attentive. We occupy all of each other's attention."

"Every time you feel less, every time you are more of a stone thing. And you go back every time hoping to feel again."

[quotes] 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami 1993

 

"If you really want to know what's happening here and now, you've got to use your own eyes and your own judgment."

"As the sun was setting, he would head out for a long walk, and once the sun was down he would read a book while listening to music."

"You transform the scenes you see into your own words and reconstruct them. And you confirm your own existence."

"What most surprised Aomame was the fact that people continued to dig coal out of the earth in an age when bases were being built on the moon."

"He was a born technician, possessing both the intense concentration of a bird sailing through the air in search of prey and the patience of a donkey hauling water, playing always by the rules of the game."

"The air outside was chilling and fresh with the smell of trees and grass. This was the real world. Here time flowed in the normal manner. Aomame inhaled the real world's air deep into her lungs."

"It felt as if something had awakened a memory that had been asleep inside me for years. Something seemed to grab my shoulder and shake me."

"'Are you a feminist, of a lesbian?'"

"Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone's soul being blown to the far side of the world."

"One aim of my field is to relativize the images possessed by individuals, discover in these images the factors universal of all human beings, and feed these universal truths back to those same individuals. As a result of this process, people might be able to belong to something even as they maintain their autonomy."

"After she had been sitting there for a considerable length of time, she felt all the liquids in her body pouring out of her."

"It was after this that Aomame came to feel an intense periodic craving for men's bodies."

"Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim."

"But pure, unadulterated feelings are dangerous in their own way. It is no easy feat for a flesh-and-blood human being to go on living with such feelings. That is why it is necessary for you to fasten your feelings to the earth - firmly, like attaching an anchor to a balloon. The money is for that."

"If, as the dowager said, we are nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn't our genetic purpose - to transmit DNA - be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating? Did it benefit the genes in any way for us to lead such intricately warped, even bizarre, lives?"

"Tengo had no particular desire for other women. What he wanted most of all was uninterrupted free time. If he could have sex on a regular basis, he had nothing more to ask of a woman."

"The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don't want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can't turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories."

"It was not just that he had terrible style: he also gave the impression that he was deliberately desecrating the very idea of wearing clothes."

"Aside from the rubber plant, there was almost nothing left in the room that still had the smell life."

"He does not exist here, with me, but flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken."

"As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from."

"Writing - and especially fiction writing - is well suited to my personality, I think. It's good to have something you want to do, and now I finally have it."

"Still, I have to keep soldiering on until I die, the only way I know how. Not a laudable sort of life, but the only life I know how to live."

"On the wall was a round clock. It was an old, dusty clock, but it told the time correctly. It's role, perhaps, was to be a witness of some kind."

"I will probably never see these bones again, he thought. All that is left will be memories, and eventually they, too, will vanish like dust."

"The boundary between herself and the world seemed blurred."