placidcrow > placidcrow's Quotes

“People don’t just happen. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The “I” it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, “I am no longer yours.” My grandmother and I, without knowing it, were faithfully following a script that had already been written for us. A woman raises a boy into a man, loving him so intensely that her commitment finally repulses him.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“The sons of single mothers inevitably encounter well-meaning family members who like to remind us of our role as "the man of the house." The statement usually made me wince, the way it implicitly merged the roles of son, father, and husband; the way it erased the grown woman to whom the house actually belonged.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“It was if I wanted credit for rescuing my mother from a fire that I had set and couldn’t put out. I wasn’t the man of the house; I was the kid who’d finally lit his first match.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“The world ain't straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there's a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn't care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain't straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don't mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“If you're a coward--and let's just say that you are, for the sake of argument--it means nothing. My Aunt Peg, she's an alcoholic. She can't handle drinking. It ruins her life and turns her into a mess--and do you know what that means? It means nothing. Do you think it makes her a bad person? Of course not--it's just the way she is. Alcoholism just happened to her, Frank. Things happen to people. We are the way we are--there's nothing to be done for it. My Uncle Billy--he couldn't keep a promise or stay faithful to a woman. It meant nothing. He was a wonderful person, Frank, and he was completely untrustworthy. It's just how he was. It didn't mean anything. We all still loved him.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“The secret to falling in love so fast, of course, is not to know the person at all. You just need to identify one exciting feature about them, and then you hurl your heart at that one feature, with full force, trusting that this will be enough of a foundation for lasting devotion.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“They knew our names and they knew our parents. But they did not know us, because not knowing was essential to their power. To sell a child right from under his mother, you must know that mother only in the thinnest way possible. To strip a man down, condemn him to be beaten, flayed alive, then anointed with salt water, you cannot feel him the way you feel your own. You cannot see yourself in him, lest your hand be stayed, and your hand must never be stayed, because the moment it is, the Tasked will see that you see them, and thus see yourself. In that moment of profound understanding, you are all done, because you cannot rule as is needed.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“The masters could not bring water to boil, harness a horse, nor strap their own drawers without us. We were better than them—we had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them it was the whole ambition of their lives.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“The tree of our family was parted - branches here, roots there - parted for their lumber.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“I did not ask. Later I felt bad about this. I knew, even then, that whenever I nodded along in ignorance, I lost an opportunity, betrayed the wonder in me by privileging the appearance of knowing over the work of finding out.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“I had not been prepared for the simple charm of watching someone you love grow.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“The key to moving forward is what we do with our discomfort. We can use it as a door out—blame the messenger and disregard the message. Or we can use it as a door in by asking, Why does this unsettle me? What would it mean for me if this were true?”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Take stock of who we are, and what we have, and then use it for good.”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“So much could be solved, she thinks, if we simply held hands with each other more often.”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“Everything ends,” she says. “That’s nothing to be sad about. What matters is what starts in that moment.”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“This was not a tragedy. Dying on your couch watching TV by yourself is a tragedy. Dying while doing something you love with every part of your body is magic. I wish you magic, Edward.”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“He wants to make sure he’ll always be there, no matter what. He wants to leave his fingerprints all over me, every piece of muscle and bone.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“I like good strong words that mean something…”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“I'd rather take coffee than compliments just now.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Be worthy love, and love will come.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“It amazed Izzy the way the children rushed through so many complicated emotions without space between each one. Everything rose so quickly to the surface and then subsided, like firecrackers, and what had originally been so jarring to her, their unguarded emotion, now filled her with great comfort, that anything, no matter what it was, would eventually give way to something else.”
― Kevin Wilson, Perfect Little World

“A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“You tried to tell your story to people who didn't know how to listen.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“If, one day, a milky portal had opened up in your bedroom and an older version of yourself had stepped out and told you what you know now, would you have listened?”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Nonstalgia (noun) The unsettling sensation that you are never be able to fully access the past; that once you are departed from an event, some essential quality of it is lost forever. A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember. —Sarah Manguso”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House