Joey Crate

“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

“She’d worn anxiety like a thick robe for so long that it was hard for her to take it off.”
― Pernell Plath Meier, In Our Bones

“How do we remember this emptiness so in fullness we won't forget?' Asked once, when emptiness was the worst. Why ever [would] he want to remember that?”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, Into the Forest

“I was harder than Dante. I think I'd tried to hide that hardness from him because I'd wanted him to like me. But now he knew. That I was hard. And maybe that was okay. Maybe he could like the fact that I was hard just as I liked the fact that he wasn't hard.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe