Angel Lemke

“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

“I composed balanced sentences and periodic sentences and practiced, till I was blue in the face, the English department adage, Vary your sentence structure. Amazingly enough, having a mix of long and short sentences, along with topic-body-conclusion paragraph structure, did not automatically make my prose interesting.”
― Douglas Glover, Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing

“[Trump] and his ideas are not exceptional. He and the people who support him are just the latest examples of the country's ongoing betrayal. . .When we make Trump exceptional, we let ourselves off the hook. For he is us, just as surely as the slave-owning Founding Fathers were us, as surely as Lincoln with his talk of sending Black people to Liberia was us, as surely as Reagan was us with his welfare queens. When we are surprised to see the reemergence of Klansman, Neo-Nazis and other White Nationalists, we reveal our willful ignorance about how our own choices make them possible.”
― Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

“There is a moment following tragedy that some people never get to experience. You have to be ready for it or it will crush you to dust. It's like a window flung open and naked to the day. It's like being lifted away. It's like being stranded with everything you need. It's the moment you call a cornfield beautiful because you mean it, because you've never seen the world like this before, because newness no longer strikes terror but rather brings hope. You jerk awake into it like meeting yourself on a blind date. You surrender to that sudden first rush of joy without consequence, no more doom or fear or guilt, surrender to the sheer devastating presence of life, huge and indifferent, pushing into you like God's breath.”
― Sung Yim