Tom Williams > Tom's Quotes

“Demond’s family history wasn’t so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing. We tried to ignore it, but sometimes we caught ourselves repeating what history said, mumbling along, brainwashed: I am nothing. We drank too much, smoked too much, were abusive to ourselves, to each other. We were bewildered. There is a great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“We crawled through time like roaches through the linings of walls, the neglected spaces and hours, foolishly happy that we were still alive even as we did everything to die.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“But this grief, for all its awful weight, insists that he matters.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“I knew that I lived in a place where hope and a sense of possibility were as ephemeral as morning fog, but I did not see the despair at the heart of our drug use.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“Everyone lives alone in families. Everyone goes alone into action, love, and work. Sometimes, it's why we work. Everyone goes alone into sickness, too.”
― Molly Brodak, Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir

“So we stopped making up stories of how our horror was salvation and just lived it.”
― Molly Brodak, A Little Middle of the Night

“It takes courage...to endure the sharp pains of self discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.”
― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"

“the ache of the now-you, which feels like the only you when you want something”
― Molly Brodak, Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski