Charity C > Charity's Quotes

“Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“Lies by omission are still lies.”
― Alexa Martin, Intercepted

“Not to trust everybody. You might be doing right by them, but some people aren't strong enough to do right by you. And that's as much your fault as theirs.”
― Alexa Martin, Intercepted

“His dad had told him many times that the definition of a real man is one who cries without shame, reads poetry with his heart, feels opera in his soul, and does what’s necessary to defend a woman.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“You tread lightly through life, but you leave deep footprints that are hard for other people to fill.”
― Josie Silver, One Day in December

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“he’s got a terrible marriage and doesn’t want to go home, and don’t ask how I know that, everyone knows when you’ve got a terrible marriage, it’s like having bad breath, you get close enough to a person and it’s obvious.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Survival is insufficient.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think - this will maybe sound weird - it's like the corporate world's full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I've had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia's no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts."

"I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite --"

"I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that."

"You don't think he likes his job, then."

"Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realises it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“It ain't about making white folk feel what you feel," she said. "It's about not feeling what they want you to feel.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“But the problem is you hurting yourself by trying to let folk know they hurt you.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“gorge. I will want to punish my black body because fetishizing and punishing black bodies are what we are trained to do well in America. I will write. I will revise.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“For the first time in my life, I experienced not having the most fear-provoking body in a contained American space.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“And it only existed on Cosby’s show because Bill Cosby seemed obsessed with how white folk watched black folk watch us watch him.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“I loved all my teachers, and I wanted all my teachers to love us. I knew they weren’t being paid right. I knew they were expected to do work they were unprepared to start or finish. But I felt like we spent much of our time teaching them how to respect where we’d been, and they spent much of their time punishing us for teaching them how we deserved to be treated.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“I'd never imagined Layla being in one emergency, much less emergencies. Part of it was Layla was a black girl and I was taught by big boys that black girls would be okay no matter what we did to them.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“I’d never heard of white folk getting caught and paying for anything they did to us, or stole from us. Didn’t matter if it was white police, white teachers, white students, or white randoms.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“I knew the big boys would tell stories about what happened in Daryl’s bedroom that were good for all three of them and sad for her in three vastly different ways.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“It ain’t about making white folk feel what you feel,” she said. “It’s about not feeling what they want you to feel. Do you hear me? You better know from whence you came and forget about those folk.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“You took my paper smudged with tears and you read it out loud. You told me what worked in the essay, and what didn’t work. You asked me questions about word choice, pacing, and something you called political symbolism. You asked me what I was really trying to say with the essay and suggested I start with saying exactly that. You challenged me to use the rest of the essay to discover ideas and questions I didn’t already know and feel. “A good question anchored in real curiosity is much more important than a cliché or forced metaphor,” you told me.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“Ain’t nothing in the world worse than looking at your children drowning, knowing ain’t nothing you can do because scared that if you get to trying to save them, they might see that you can swim either.”
― Kiese Laymon , Heavy

“Most groups of men I knew were good at destroying women and girls who would do everything not to destroy them.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“I will wonder if the memories that remain with age are heavier than the ones we forget because they mean more to us, or if our bodies, like our nation, eventually purge memories we never wanted to be true.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“Mostly, I wondered what black writers weren't writing when we spent so much creative energy begging white folk to change.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“This summer, it took one final conversation with Grandmama for me to understand that no one in our family and very few folk in this nation has any desire to reckon with the weight of where we've been. Which means no one in our family and very few folk in this nation wants to be free.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“Our superpower, I was told since I was a child, was perseverance, the ability to survive no matter how much they took from us. I never understood how surviving was our collective superpower when white folk made sure so many of us didn't survive. And those of us who did survive practiced bending so much that breaking seemed inevitable.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“The nation as it is currently constituted has never dealt with a yesterday or tomorrow where we were radically honest, generous, and tender with each other.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“My body knew things my mouth and my mind couldn't, or maybe wouldn't, express. It knew that all over my neighborhood, boys were trained to harm girls in ways girls could never harm boys, straight kids were trained to harm queer kids in ways queer kids could never harm straight kids, men were trained to harm women in ways women could never harm men, parents were trained to harm children in ways children would never harm parents, babysitters were trained to harm kids in ways kids could never harm babysitters. My body knew white folk were trained to harm us in ways we could never harm them.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“rest of my teachers maybe did the best they could, but they just needed a lot of help making their best better. There were so many things we needed in those classrooms, in our city, in our state, in our country that our teachers could have provided if they would have gone home and really done their homework. They never once said the words: “economic inequality,” “housing discrimination,” “sexual violence,” “mass incarceration,” “homophobia,” “empire,” “mass eviction,” “post traumatic stress disorder,” “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “neo-confederacy,” “mental health,” or “parental abuse,” yet every student and teacher at that school lived in a world shaped by those words.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy