Nichole > Nichole's Quotes

“Here’s a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective—collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“What I knew from working in professional environments—from recruiting new lawyers for Sidley & Austin to hiring staff at the White House—is that sameness breeds more sameness, until you make a thoughtful effort to counteract it.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I tried not to feel intimidated when classroom conversation was dominated by male students, which it often was. Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Bravery is the choice to show up and listen to another person, be it a loved one or perceived foe, even when it is uncomfortable, painful, or the last thing you want to do.”
― Alaric Hutchinson

“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Courage is a defining factor in the life of any artist. The courage to bare your innermost feelings, to reveal your true voice, or to stand in front of an audience and lay it out there for the world to see. The emotional vulnerability that is often necessary to summon a great song can also work against you when sharing your song for the world to hear. This is the paralyzing conflict of any sensitive artist. A feeling I’ve experienced with every lyric I’ve sung to someone other than myself. Will they like it? Am I good enough? It is the courage to be yourself that bridges those opposing emotions, and when it does, magic can happen.”
― Dave Grohl, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music

“Trust me, the sweet sting of a love refused is powerful enough to send any scribe scrambling for pen and paper.”
― Dave Grohl, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music

“When you're young you believe that love is infatuation, but infatuation is simple, any child can become infatuated, fall in love. But real love? Love is a job for an adult. Love demands a whole person, all the best of you, all the worst. It has nothing to do with romance, because the hard part of a marriage isn't that I have to live seeing all your faults, but that you have to live with me seeing them. That I know everything about you now. Most people aren't brave enough to live without secrets. Everyone dreams about being invisible sometimes, no one dreams of being transparent.

Marriage? There ought to be a different word for it after a while. Because there's no such thing as 'eternal infatuation,' only love lasts that long, and it's never simple. It requires a whole person, everything you have. The whole lot.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“All those decades of the arms race, and it turned out there was no greater damage you could inflict on a state than to ensure it was led by an idiot.”
― Mick Herron, Bad Actors

“The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Oppression is never about humanity or lack thereof. It is, and always has been, about power.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“What would it take—what does it take—for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life? Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been? Just because something is difficult to accept doesn’t mean you should refuse to accept it. Just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“I’ve come to realize that there’s a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between those two is memory,” he said. “I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts, and somewhere in between is memory, which is kind of this blend of history and a little bit of emotion…I mean, history is kind of about what you need to know…but nostalgia is what you want to hear.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“We’re telling history by telling the full story, more of the story of everyone who lived here, not just certain people who were able to tell their stories.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“[Angola Prison] 'This place really is just like the plantation was. Just to utilize all the free labor they can get,' Norris continued. 'They lost all that free labor to emancipation, and now how are we going to get that free labor back? You've got all these folks wandering around with no real skills, don't know what to do, well, we can create laws to put them back in servitude, and that's what they've done. Where do they work? They go right back to working convict leasing, working these same plantations they were freed from.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Before I left [Monticello], I wanted to understand how much of David's role as a former military officer -- responsible for protecting and promoting this country's foreign policy agenda at home and abroad -- was something that felt, if at all, in tension with his role [as a tour guide] now. 'I was born in the United States of America. I served the country for thirty years, so I actually believe in the idea of America,' he said, straightening up in his chair. 'Are we exceptional? No. Have we had unique advantages based on geography, based on a whole host of factors? Yes. Did a group of people come together in 1776 and conceive of an idea that was pretty radical in its time and then create a system of government, through the Constitution and its amendments, that was pretty radical and pretty novel? Yeah. Have other countries found their own way? Sure. So I believe in the idea of America. I don't believe that this country was perfect. I don't believe it is perfect. I don't believe it's going to be perfect. I believe that the journey to make this a better place is worth the effort and that the United States, if you conceive it not so much as a place to be in but an idea to believe in, it worth fighting for.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“While a life like Frederick Douglas’s is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglas. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave brakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglas. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country’s teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives, at the expense of millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told.

I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglas, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy. It illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, despite the most brutal circumstances, attain super-human heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, and the people who maintained it.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Slavery’s an institution. In Jefferson’s lifetime it becomes a system. So what is this slave system? It is a system of exploitation, a system of inequality and exclusion, a system where people are owned as property and held down by physical and psychological force, a system being justified even by people who know slavery is morally wrong. By doing what? Denying the very humanity of those who are enslaved solely on the basis of the color of their skin.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“When people say 'Angola is a prison built on a former plantation' it is often made as an unsettling observation not as a moral indictment. Is it because our collective understanding of slavery and its inherent violence is so limited? Or is it that violence experienced by Black people is thought less worthy of mourning? White supremacy enacts violence against Black people, but also numbs a whole country, black and white, so what would, in any other context, provoke our moral indignation.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Yes, well, you’re not the same race as many other people in New York, and people’s lived experiences may be different from yours. Your perspective might be valid in your social circle; in other social circles it may not be. That’s all.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“So much of the story we tell about history is really the story that we tell about ourselves, about our mothers and our fathers and their mothers and their fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. Throughout our lives we are told certain stories and they are stories that we choose to believe—stories that become embedded in our identities in ways we are not always fully cognizant of.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Instead of purchasing a bed, Norris said, the Department of Corrections found it cheaper to direct the prisoners in the machine and welding shops to build it, with each part of the bed assembled separately. Norris paused, shaking his head at the memory. “One of the guys on the welding crew, his brother was on death row.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“turned and asked Norris, “How much did you get paid when you worked in the field?” “They give folks an allowance. First six months when I came to prison, you didn’t earn anything,” he said. “The first six months you’re paying off all your clothes that we got to give you while you’re here. Now, go figure.” Norris chuckled. “Six months going to pay for clothes for a lifetime.” But how much does someone make after the period is finished? I asked. “Jobs in the field? Seven cents an hour.” I leaned in, thinking I had misheard. “Seven cents,” Norris said again.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“From the window, we saw a group of two dozen men in white-and-blue sweatshirts with garden hoes methodically rising in their hands and then falling to the earth. Their bodies were set against a backdrop of trees that had tumbled into autumn, draping them in a volcanic sea of red and orange. It had been one thing to see Black men laboring in the fields of Angola in photographs but it was quite different to see it in person. The parallel with chattel slavery made it feel as if time was bending in on itself. There was no need for metaphor; the land made it literal.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Both of the men inscribed words that promoted equality and freedom in the founding documents of the United States while owning other human beings.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Every time I returned home I would drive on streets named for those who thought of me as chattel. “Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee.” “Take a left on Jefferson Davis.” “Make the first right on Claiborne.” Translation: “Go straight for two miles on the general whose troops slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender.” “Take a left on the president of the Confederacy, who understood the torture of Black bodies as the cornerstone of their new nation.” “Make the first right on the man who allowed the heads of rebelling slaves to be mounted on stakes in order to prevent other slaves from getting any ideas.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“It is not enough to study history. It is not enough to celebrate singular moments of our past or to lift up the legacy of victories that have been won without understanding the effects of those victories—and those losses—on the world around us today.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“When many people say “Angola is a prison built on a former plantation,” it is often made as an unsettling observation, not as a moral indictment. Is it because our collective understanding of slavery, and its inherent violence, is so limited? Or is it that violence experienced by Black people is thought less worthy of mourning? White supremacy enacts violence against Black people, but also numbs a whole country—Black and white—to what would in any other context provoke our moral indignation.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“We're not changing history…We're telling history by telling the full story, more of the story of everyone who lived here, not just certain people who were able to tell their stories.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts, and somewhere in between is memory, which is kind of this blend of history and a little bit of emotion…I mean, history is kind of about what you need to know…but nostalgia is what you want to hear.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America