Stephen Williams

“The colored people [in Atlanta] drew a fence around themselves and manufactured a world so grand they told themselves they didn't want whatever Jim Crow was keeping from them.

Pg 117”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“Words are often almost useless in sentient affairs,” Leto said. Moneo held his breathing to a shallow minimum. The Lord can read thoughts! “Throughout our history,” Leto said, “the most potent use of words has been to round out some transcendental event, giving that event a place in the accepted chronicles, explaining the event in such a way that ever afterward we can use those words and say: “This is what it meant.” Moneo felt beaten down by these words, terrified by unspoken things they might make him think. “That’s how events get lost in history,” Leto said.”
― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

“The people there had lived their little passage of time in this world, had become what they became, and now could be changed only by forgiveness and mercy. The misled, the disappointed, the sinners of all the sins, the hopeful, the faithful, the loving, the doubtful, the desperate, the grieved and the comforted, the young and the old, the bad and the good—all, sufferers unto death, had lain down there together. Some were there who had served the community better by dying than by living. Why I should have felt tender toward them all was not clear to me, but I did.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“Contrary to modern-day assumptions, for much of the history of the United States—from the Draft Riots of the 1860s to the violence over desegregation a century later—riots were often carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival. Thus riots would become to the North what lynchings were to the South, each a display of uncontained rage by put-upon people directed toward the scapegoats of their condition. Nearly every big northern city experienced one or more during the twentieth century.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration