Dan Beck

“Justice

That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.”
― Langston Hughes, The Panther and the Lash

“In general, I don’t like to blame the creators. They are making work that appeals to them and the people in the room with them. They are making something that is, at some level, genuine. But the distributors, the networks that bring art to the population, they are the ones who ensure that there’s a flattening and narrowing. The younger me may have sat up all night with bandmates raging against Puffy or DMX or whoever, but the fact is that they were never the problem. The problem was that someone in the corporate chain of command felt that there was a need to play those songs fourteen times a day and to eliminate alternatives.”
― Ahmir Questlove Thompson, Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But, sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell. - Thorin”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“At home I used to walk through emotional wastelands where the lines on craggy faces were so deep that the wind whistled through them. People fell in and out of my life, but it was the places that really mattered. Even now I can feel them tugging at my sleeve and spinning around in my head. All the old stories have it wrong, because it's not the ghost that haunts the house; it's the house that haunts the ghost. I feel lost out here, and everything reminds me that I'm not quite real. In the end it's always home that damns us.”
― Damien Echols, Life After Death