Lacey

“The thing is we don't need to change our brains at all. Time does so much of the emptying for us.Live long enough and you'll forget almost everything you thought you'd always remember.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“Boats that stay in the harbor are safe, sweetheart, but that's not what boats were built for.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“In just that short amount of time, Nana’s addiction had become the sun around which all of our lives revolved. I didn’t want to stare directly at it.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“My father who got cages instead of compassion.

My father whose whole story no one of us will ever know.

What did it do to him, all those years locked away, all that time in chains, all those days upon days without human touch except touch meant to harm - hand behind your back, N****r. Get on the fucking wall, N****r! Lift your sac, N****r. Don't look at me like that or I will f*****g kill your Black ass.

It would be easy to speculate about the impact of years of cocaine use on my father's heart, but I suspect that it will tell us less than if we could measure the cumulative effects of hatred, racism and indignity. What is the impact of years of strip searches, of being bent over, the years before that when you were a child and knew that no dream you had for yourself was taken seriously by anyone, that you were not someone who would be fully invested in by a nation that treated you as expendable?”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir