Shauni

“And that, by extrapolation, every person in the world has his or her inner orchestra, and the instruments present in their orchestras are, roughly speaking, the same as the ones in ours. And this is why literature works.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“Across the United States, and abroad, there are places whose histories are inextricably tied to the story of human bondage. Many of these places directly confront and reflect on their relationship to that history; many of these places do not. But in order for our country to collectively move forward, it is not enough to have a patchwork of places that are honest about this history while being surrounded by other spaces that undermine it. It must be a collective endeavor to learn and confront the story of slavery and how it has shaped the world we live in today.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“He had also gone through a bad divorce, become estranged from his only daughter and been diagnosed with skin cancer, but he insisted that all of that, however painful, was secondary to the sudden realization that it was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon—which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Then, as now, the public must be convinced that their own interests are aligned with the advancement of racial minorities or that they will not suffer when others are promoted.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap