Kayla Cheye > Kayla's Quotes

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”
― Margaret Mead

“Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of “government of the people,” but the means by which “the people” acquired their names.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Faggot” was a word I had employed all my life. And now here they were, The Cabal, The Coven, The Others, The Monsters, The Outsiders, The Faggots, The Dykes, dressed in all their human clothes. I am black, and have been plundered and have lost my body. But perhaps I too had the capacity for plunder, maybe I would take another human’s body to confirm myself in a community. Perhaps I already had. Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“But a great number of educators spoke of “personal responsibility” in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“I am ashamed of how I acted that day, ashamed of endangering your body. But I am not ashamed because I am a bad father, a bad individual or ill mannered. I am ashamed that I made an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“If you done it, it ain't bragging.”
― Walt Whitman

“I exist as I am, that is enough.”
― Walt Whitman

“Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you.”
― Walt Whitman

“Good intention" is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Sometimes regrets aren't based on fact at all”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Nora had always had a problem accepting herself. From as far back as she could remember, she'd had the sense that she wasn't enough. Her parents who both had their own insecurities, had encouraged that idea.
She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn't reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed.
She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale.
She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying her best.
And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“And death is the opposite of possibility.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“But since when did taste have anything to do with happiness?”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.”
― Lance Armstrong Sally Jenkins, Every Second Counts

“You never fail until you stop trying.”
― Albert Einstein

“Try a little harder to be a little better.”
― Gordon B. Hinckley

“At the end of my life, I want to be able to say I contributed more than I criticized.”
― Brené Brown

“Observation is finer than information”
― Ronak Naneriya