Justine Rayson

“A racist cop pulls over a black driver for little reason other than the fact that the driver is black and a recent robbery was committed by a couple of young black guys in a white community. The cop quickly realizes the driver is not one of the robbery suspects. He sees a man with a wife and two small children. They are not a couple of young punks. Still,he persists. Why?
“He asks to see the driver’s license and registration. While locating the appropriate documents, the black driver respectfully volunteers that he is legally carrying a handgun. The cop panics—is it the image of a black man with a gun? He barks out conflicting orders and then shoots the man
to death, in front of his family. Why? “Is it because the cop is an insensitive racist? Maybe he wasn’t trained or taught any better? Perhaps he lived a completely different life in a completely different world than that of the black man. In this cop’s world, were all black men potential criminals, people to be watched, people to be feared?”
― Mark M. Bello, Betrayal In Black

“I came to regard my body in a new light. For the first time I apprehended the little mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young, and their physical resemblance to udders on cows or the swinging distensions on lactating hounds was suddenly unavoidable. Funny how even women forget what breasts are for.

The cleft between my legs transformed as well. It lost a certain outrageousness, an obscenity, or achieved an obscenity of a different sort. The flaps seemed to open not to a narrow, snug dead end, but to something yawning. The passageway itself became a route to somewhere else, a real place, and not merely to a darkness in my mind. The twist of flesh in front took on a devious aspect, its inclusion overtly ulterior, a tempter, a sweetener for doing the species' heavy lifting, like the lollipops I once got at the dentist.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Although champagne was served, the mood was curiously subdued. After this reunion, they would probably never meet together as a class again—at least not in such numbers. They would spend the next decades reading obituaries of the men who had started out in 1954 as rivals and today were leaving Harvard as brothers. This was the beginning of the end. They had met once more and just had time enough to learn that they liked one another. And to say goodbye.”
― Erich Segal, The Class

“I should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young.”
― Wilkie Collins