Nara

“My definition of a good book is one that you would read for pleasure despite having no prior interest in the subject. The ostensible subject may be whale hunting, or survival in Auschwitz, or waking up as a cockroach—but you don’t read it because you’re into fisheries or Nazis or entomology: you read it because your life was poorer before you started it, and because now you can’t stop.”
― Philip Gourevitch

“Childhood does not exist to serve the national economy. In a healthy nation, it should be the other way around.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Letters to a Young Teacher

“I can say it, but it doesn’t seem convincing to most people. I can call it an ‘injustice,’ but that doesn’t always sink in either. You have to understand the nature of the culture in New York. Words that are equal to the pain of the poor are pretty easily discredited. A quarter of the truth, stated with lots of indirection, is regarded as more seemly.

Even when people do accept the idea of ‘injustice,’ there are ways to live with it without it causing you to change a great deal in your life. A mildly embarrassed toleration of injustice is an elemental part of cultural sophistication here. the stile is, ‘Oh yes. We know all that. So tell us something new.’ There’s a kind of cultivated weariness in this. Talking about injustice, I am told, is ‘tiresome’ unless you do it in a way that sounds amusing.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“To make up for lost time, you need only to put down the grudge you are holding so you can pick up the phone and say, How many days did we need each other at the same time without knowing it? Bitterness is the easiest way to leave this world having had only a near-life experience.”
― Andrea Gibson, You Better Be Lightning