Brandie

“Because they were young. Because one is young only once in a life lived only once. Because recklessness is the only fist to throw at nothingness. How much aliveness can one bear?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am

“This was true—I had been inspired largely by guilt that was manifesting itself among members of my generation as a desire to help the people we kept hearing about on the news, people whose suffering we had used to explain our struggles, frame our debates, and justify our small rebellions.”
― Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

“But empires of old kept their colonies at a distance: Rome conquered the Gauls across the Alps. France ruled Algeria from across the Mediterranean. King George III dispatched troops across the Atlantic to administer the new world. In the United States in 2016 such distance does not exist: the “rough” part of Ferguson is maybe a thousand yards from the “nice” neighborhoods. And so the maintenance of the Nation’s integrity requires constant vigilance. The borders must be enforced without the benefit of actual walls and checkpoints. This requires an ungodly number of interactions between the sentries of the state and those the state views as the disorderly class. The math of large numbers means that with enough of these interactions and enough fear and suspicion on the part of the officers who wield the gun, hundreds of those who’ve been marked for monitoring will die.”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“The difference between conceding and accepting is depression.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am