María Braeuner

“Assigning guilt to the victim helped distance us from what happened to her; it wouldn’t happen to us, as long as we stayed in check. But in so doing, we had unconsciously been perpetuating a story whose moral derived from the very patriarchal system we thought we were surmounting by telling the story in the first place.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid—not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered. We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“The favorable break came through Carnegie, but what about the determination, definiteness of purpose, and the desire to attain the goal, and the persistent effort of twenty-five years? It was no ordinary desire that survived disappointment, discouragement, temporary defeat, criticism, and the constant reminding of “waste of time.” It was a burning desire! An obsession!”
― Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

“In our eagerness to find answers and simple through-lines, we overlook complexity, ignoring facts that don’t fit. The danger is that we are even more ignorant of our blindness when the narratives come with the gloss of science.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence