Sitong Peng

“was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“The heartbreak of one immigrant is never far from that of another.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“From hip-hop, I drew my earliest sense of what writing should mean. Grammar was never the point. Grammar was for the schoolmen and their television dreams. Out here, in the concrete and real, sentences should be supernatural, words strung together until they compelled any listener to repeat them at odd hours, long after the bass line had died. And these sentences or bars, linked together into verses, should have a shading and mood that reflected their origins in slavery and struggle. The sentence might be magical, but the magic was never sentimental. It was born from the want of all that exceeded the slave’s grasp and the exploration of all that divided that grasp from its desire.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy