Angel Lemke

“The enemy is conventional language; the antidote is poetry and mild intoxicants.”
― Douglas Glover, Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing

“Our task...isn't to save Trump voters. It isn't to convince them to give up their views that white people ought to matter more than others. Our task is to build a world where such a view has no place or quarter to breathe. I'm aware that this is a radical, some may even say dangerous, claim. It amounts to throwing away a large portion of the country, many of whom are willing to defend their positions with violence. But we cannot give in to these people. We know what the result will be. And I cannot watch another generation of Black children bear the burden of that choice.”
― Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

“Safety and innocence don't exist in nature. Childhood is a social construct, an ideological fever dream afforded by those whose mothers call miracles rather than eye from an ambivalent distance, fists clenched in hopes that we don't cry, for god's sake, again.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, "Do you think I could be a writer?" "'Well,' the writer said, 'do you like sentences?'" The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that "if he likes sentences he could begin," and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. "I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I like the smell of paint.'" The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabour it), is that you don't begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.”
― Stanley Fish