Michelle

“He didn't look at her, instead keeping his gaze on the piles of books still waiting to be returned to their shelves.

"Which one do you want to borrow?" she asked him after another moment's silence.

He carefully picked up a copy of Marie NDiaye's Trois femmes puissantes. Long fingers traced the black swirls of letters against the yellowed paper of an open page. "All of them.”
― Zoe B. Wallbrook, History Lessons

“Wait—this plan is mad, Mummi. Why aren’t you trying to stop me?” She pauses, glancing over her shoulder. “Because our lives are measured by the risks we take to help those in need when their need is greatest.”
― Emily Rath, North Is the Night

“Being capable of engaging with both Austen’s work and the historical realities of its time period is not a mutually exclusive exercise, but a mutually formative one, the very stuff of being a reader in the first place. To insist otherwise only reinforces the false universalizing of our art that Morrison once called tantamount to a lobotomizing of our art. The people who think that upholding a heavily edited and whitewashed truth about an author’s historical context is the only viable way to truly protect and honor that author’s work, are in fact protecting and honoring something else entirely.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“In a 1970 letter to Angela Davis, Baldwin claims, “The American triumph in which the American tragedy has always been implicit—was to make black people despise themselves.”
― Azar Nafisi, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times