Leonard Pitts Jr. > Quotes

“Not everyone has something to say. This will not stop them from saying it.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr.

“Sometimes, you simply must follow your heart," she said. "No reasonable man can blame you for that." A smile. "No reasonable woman can, either.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“Make sure your decency, your humanity, is the last thing you give up.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., The Last Thing You Surrender

“Only by vigilance toward everyone's rights do we protect anyone's rights.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr.

“There were few things more paralyzing than fear and worry, and she could not understand why other people—even Bonnie—withstood them so readily. The world was what it was, the future would be what it would be, and there was not much you could do to change either. So you did what you knew was right, you accepted the consequences, and you did not look back.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“For the first time in his life, the very first time in his life, he hated her.

Or he tried to, at least. Tried mightily. But it is a hell of a thing to hate your own mother, to hate where you came from, to hate what succored you and nourished you when you could not do it for yourself. A hell of a thing to hate that, even when it hates you, even when it calls you a nothing, calls you garbage and tells you to throw yourself away. Because even then, she is still your mother.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“Love is a powerful tie, son. At the end, it's the thing that pulls us back together when everything else has pulled us apart.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“That's funny, isn't it, how you can know him one way and we can know him some way completely different. Funny how a person can contradict their own self.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“Whoever said the truth sets you free never told the truth.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“Where there are no rights, there are no duties.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“Sometimes, yesterday says goodbye to you.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“Numb. He felt everything. He couldn't feel anything.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“You could get lost in and never care about finding your way back.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“It occurred to Mo that he didn't have any pictures of himself as a boy. Every photo he owned, every memento of his life, was from after. It was as if he had been born the day he left. He had gone out from here and invented himself.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“You could never tell if he was with you or not, so Cooley liked to talk to him just in case. Just to remind them both that this was still a human being. He never wanted to catch himself treating Jack like a thing, a chore to be done.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“It was skin, she decided. Only skin. And it had no power to add or subtract or otherwise alter her fundamental understanding of her own self.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“You think you've reached the bottom. Then you find out the bottom has a basement.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“He fell into a stillness then, remembering clenched fists, and sit-ins, and pot smoke wafting on the breeze. And power to the people. And the hope, the abiding expectation, that things could be better, that you could, if you wanted it bad enough, if you worked for it hard enough, force this old world to change. Where did it all go? he wondered. When did it all change? When did we all get so small? . . . It wasn't so long ago, explained Malcolm, that you and I wouldn't have been here arguing over who was the bigger victim. It wasn't so long ago that white guys just like you were putting themselves on the line, and even dying, because they knew that unless everybody was free, nobody was. I just wonder sometimes, how we got from people like that to people like you. . . . Small-minded people. Hateful, closed-minded, self-righteous, damned ignorant, and proud of it. We were not like that. And white people were not like that, when I was your age. . . . Yeah, he said, there was drugs and there was sex, but there was also vision. We had ambition, not for making money, but for making a difference.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Grant Park

“He had not known until that moment that your heart can break with love, that it can fill with such inexpressible tenderness till you just about can't stand it anymore.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“Everything that lived, died.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“To lose your memory is not just to lose everything you have. It's to lose everything you are. It's to lose your very self. What are you without the things you remember.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“Don't nobody like a man they can't figure.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“He was numb from aching. And from fear.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“It don't matter none where you start in life. What matters is where you finish.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“You see, the thing is, we write our own eulogies. Someone else delivers it, yes, but each of us authors his own in the life he lives and the memories he leaves.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr.

“When the inky blackness above shades to a deep blue and the stars lose their hard edge and begin to seem unreal, she rises, wrapping the thin sheet about herself, and steps outside into the morning chill.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“They drove through the intersection and turned left on a street Mo had once known like his favorite song. It was strange to him now and he wondered if that was because of the disease or just the natural effect of change itself, the tendency of things to move around on you, to shift when you weren't looking. So that you could get back and be a stranger in your own places.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Before I Forget

“What a cruel joke to lose his arm after the fighting was done. Or maybe that was wrong. Maybe that was the lesson here: that the fighting wasn’t done, after all. Maybe it never would be.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Freeman

“Then the ’60s had gotten angry. Those other ’60s, the later ’60s, were not about marching forward, but fighting back. Segregation, determination, demonstration, integration, aggravation, humiliation, obligation to the nation, they had exploded in a ball of confusion, riot, and rage that burned halfway through the next decade. And the band played on.”
― Jr., Leonard Pitts, Grant Park: A Novel