Charles M. Blow > Quotes

“One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.”
― Charles M. Blow

“There is no wrong time to do the right thing.”
― Charles M. Blow

“Trump’s America is not America: not today’s or tomorrow’s, but yesterday’s.

Trump’s America is brutal, perverse, regressive, insular and afraid. There is no hope in it; there is no light in it. It is a vast expanse of darkness and desolation.

And that is a vision of America that most of the people in this country cannot and will not abide.”
― Charles M. Blow

“I don't know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff wire.”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir

“A lie is like a cat: you need to stop it before it gets out the door or it’s really hard to catch.”
― Charles M. Blow

“We need to see people other than ourselves in order to empathize. If we don't live around others we do ourselves and our society damage because our ability to relate becomes impaired. It's easy to demonize, or simply dismiss, people you don't know or see...It's nearly impossible to commiserate with the unseen and unknown.”
― Charles Blow

“The only way to vanquish cowardice is to brandish courage.”
― Charles M. Blow

“I would harness the truths that had been trapped in me like a fire shut up in my bones. I would give my life over to my passions, my writing, and my children, and they would breathe life back into me.”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones

“You don’t have to dumb it down, but you do have to sum it up.”
― Charles M. Blow

“I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir

“Children can’t see their budding lives through the long lens of wisdom – the wisdom that benefits from years passed, hurdles overcome, strength summoned, resilience realized, selves discovered and accepted, hearts broken but mended and love experienced in the fullest, truest majesty that the word deserves. For them, the weight of ridicule and ostracism can feel crushing and without the possibility of reprieve. And, in that dark and lonely place, desperate and confused, they can make horrible decisions that can’t be undone.”
― Charles M. Blow

“It has been my experience that the "hardest" people in the world are actually the most fragile and the most soft-spoken are the strongest...”
― Charles M. Blow

“It was the kind of building that remembered things, deep-down things, things that rode tears into the world, telling them back to anyone old enough or wise enough to know how to listen with their eyes.”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir

“It was words and reading that had made me quiet, and being quiet had made me a mark.”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir

“Children see God every day; they just don't call it that. It's the summer sky painted with cumulus clouds by day and sequined with a million stars by night. It's the sweet whispers of sweet gum trees and the sounds riding the tops of honeysuckle-scented breezes. Children feel God stuffed into brown fluffy dogs with stitches strong enough to withstand a good squeeze, and on the lips of round women who can't get enough sugar from Chocolate.

I began to believe that God is us and nature, beauty and love, mystery and majesty, everything right and good.”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir

“A heart still works even when it's broken”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir

“Voter apathy is a civic abdication.”
― Charles M. Blow

“No one knows how to hold a grudge like a proper Southerner.”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir

“Our politics are overrun with characters acting at the behest of shadows.”
― Charles M. Blow

“Trying hard and working hard is its own reward. It feeds the soul. It affirms your will and your power. And it radiates from you, lighting the way for all those who see you.”
― Charles M. Blow

“I say, seeking to diminish the human dignity of another whose only crime is not loving whom you would have him or her love is immoral and an offense to the indomitable determination of the heart.”
― Charles M. Blow

“I better understood the little lies that liquor told, lifting spirits and drowning sorrows while withholding the whole truth--that, in the end, it is the spirit in peril of drowning. Sorrows have gills.”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir

“For much of my life I would crave attention with a carnal intensity. From anyone. From everyone. That feeling of being chosen. I would flirt with anyone who was congenial and amenable—a ravenous, indiscriminate flirtation, or a feather-light, barely-there one—or allow myself to be flirted with, by women and men alike, to cover the emptiness I felt or to fill in the hole, the desired culmination being not so much physical intimacy as emotional affirmation. The boy who had once felt invisible would forever ache simply to be seen.”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones

“It would only be in the cold gaze of hindsight that I would be able to comprehend that while in flight from pain, I became an agent of it.”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones

“Co-opted convictions will always betray you.”
― Charles M. Blow

“The house had a small galley kitchen where my mother performed daily miracles, stretching a handful into a potful, making the most of what we raised. Cooking mostly from memory and instinct, she took a packet of meat, a bunch of greens or a bag of peas, a couple of potatoes, a bowl of flour, a cup of cornmeal, a few tablespoons of sugar, added a smattering of this and a smidgeon of that, and produced meals of rich and complementary flavors and textures. Delicious fried chicken, pork chops, and steak, sometimes smothered with hearty gravy, the meat so tender that it fell from the bone. Cob-scraped corn pan-fried in bacon drippings, served with black-eyed peas and garnished with thick slices of fresh tomato, a handful of diced onion, and a tablespoon of sweet pickle relish. A mess of overcooked turnips simmering in neck-bone-seasoned pot liquor, nearly black—tender and delectable. The greens were minced on the plate, doused with hot pepper sauce, and served with a couple sticks of green onions and palm-sized pieces of hot-water cornbread, fried golden brown, covered with ridges from the hand that formed them, crispy shell, crumbly soft beneath.”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones

“But even more important was the idea that, at any moment, we all had the awesome and underutilized power to simply let go of our past and step beyond it.”
― Charles M. Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones

“Boys hijacked by hormones don’t really think, they chase. They see risk and consequences as if through the wrong end of a telescope: smaller and pushed far away.”
― Charles M. Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir

“Racism doesn't wither, but is trained when to advance or retreat. It becomes self-regulating.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“Time ground to a halt and the trees whispered in the language of God and nature about steadfastness and resilience—gently saying that one could be constantly stirred yet not moved, bent but not broken, that a thing well grounded and deeply rooted could ever stand.”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones