“The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
“Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.”
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
“As the British Empire fell, the Afrikaner rose up to claim South Africa as his rightful inheritance. To maintain power in the face of the country’s rising and restless black majority, the government realized they needed a newer and more robust set of tools. They set up a formal commission to go out and study institutionalized racism all over the world. They went to Australia. They went to the Netherlands. They went to America. They saw what worked, what didn’t. Then they came back and published a report, and the government used that knowledge to build the most advanced system of racial oppression known to man. Apartheid was a police state, a system of surveillance and laws designed to keep black people under total control. A full compendium of those laws would run more than three thousand pages and weigh approximately ten pounds, but the general thrust of it should be easy enough for any American to understand. In America you had the forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid.”
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
“This is why I feel frustrated now when I hear people referring to suicide as a self-centered act: of course it is. Nobody would commit suicide if the pain of being inside her self, the agony of the sleepless, tortured hours spent watching the world get smaller and uglier, were bearable or could be relieved by other people telling her how they wanted her to feel. A depressed person is selfish because her self, the very core of who she is, will not leave her alone, and she can no more stop thinking about this self and how to escape it than a prisoner held captive by a sadistic serial killer can forget about the person who comes in to torture her every day. Her body is brutalized by her mind. It hurts to breathe, sleep, eat, walk, think. The gross maneuverings of her limbs are so overwhelming, so wearying, that the fine muscle movements or quickness of wit necessary to write, to actually say something, are completely out of the question.”
―
―
“One of the things I’ve read about borderlines is that we alternate between a sense of entitlement and the belief that we’re lower than the dirt under people’s shoes.”
― Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl
― Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl
Remy’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Remy’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Remy
Lists liked by Remy






















