Charleen

“The text has in it the wizardry of politics—the fact that it is possible for a multitudinous heap of people to build a shared life by doing things with words.”
― Danielle S. Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

“Marriage was explained to me as a bargain—be good, be quiet, be grateful. Then I saw what it would cost my face.”
― Angelika Regossi, Russian Colonial Food: Journey through the dissolved Communist Empire

“Because power corrupts, society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.”
― John Adams, Best Quotations of John Adams

“What I’m here to talk about is how our whole approach since day one has been like this: Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This is what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they’ve inherited. And we’re either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths, just like I did with my brother, or we’re absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up. I’m in suicide prevention now. I’ve had fifteen relatives commit suicide over the course of my life, not counting my brother. I had one community I was working with recently in South Dakota tell me they were grieved out.”
― Tommy Orange, There There