Shirley

“I never trust people with no appetite. It's like they're always holding something back on you.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“not just because of the black people swept away but because I know that “gentrification” is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off of that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime. To speak the word gentrification is to immediately lie. And I know, even in my anger, even as I write this, that I am no better. White people are, in some profound way, trapped; it took generations to make them white, and it will take more to unmake them.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore