David Monroe

“Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. It was for fear of being beaten to this beat that black soldiers avoided the Saigon bars where their white comrades kept the jukeboxes humming with Hank Williams and his kind, sonic signposts that said, in essence, No Niggers.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“It's an actual fucking library, and there's a body in it!”
― John Banville, Snow

“To become a fan of something, to open and change, is a move of deliberate optimism, curiosity, and enthusiasm.”
― Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

“Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.”
― John Hodgman