Marvin

“Don't hate white people. They can't help it. They have a learning disability. They need your compassion. They need accommodations. They are like preschoolers--their understanding of race is so basic. They can't be faulted for being uncomfortable with somebody who has what amounts to a graduate degree in race--that is, us. It's not fair for preschoolers to be placed in the same classroom with graduate students and be forced to compete. Pity them, Maria. Take their hands and explain very slowly and very carefully to them the truth of what you know, but with kindness in your heart. Have compassion for them, because not everybody starts on an equal playing field.”
― Danzy Senna, New People

“History as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.
History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man's dominion of the earth.
My own story, anyone's own story, is always told against me, even what I myself am writing here, because I have no heroic history to offer. There is no difficulty not of my own making. The heart and the soul, so beloved of God, are both filthied up by residence here, how can we avoid it? . . . It is strange. I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old, first pattern in them, and cherish them for that.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.--Quoted in Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood”
― Rebecca West

“I don’t believe in anything except this one thing: where you are. Everybody has a place: that’s all I believe in. Whether you call it home or not, whether it is where you end up or where you started or somewhere in between, everybody has a place. Like where animals go to hide, to sleep, to die (292).”
― James Robertson, News of the Dead