Kelly McCubbin
https://www.goodreads.com/kmccubbin
“I didn’t yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble.”
― Between the World and Me
― Between the World and Me
“Armed with a hammer and sickle, singer and folklorist A. L. Lloyd hit the nail on the head and cut to the quick on page one of his monumental study of folk song: ‘The mother of folklore is poverty.’3”
― Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music
― Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music
“What the songs do,’ Shirley confides, ‘is take me into that world [of the past]; they take you back centuries. In a twelve-verse song, you can be transported, and I think that’s such a strength in a song, that it can take you on a journey. Sometimes you don’t even know what sort of journey you’ve gone on, because a lot of the meanings have eroded over the years, and you just get glimpses of lives. Not through the words of a great playwright or poet or author, but just through the minds and mirrors of ordinary people. I think one of the reasons the country’s in such trouble is that nobody’s connected to it, to their ancestors or what’s gone before. And if other people’s lives aren’t important, I don’t know how your own can be.”
― Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music
― Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music
“But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.”
― Between the World and Me
― Between the World and Me
“When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.”
― Swann’s Way
― Swann’s Way
Kelly’s 2025 Year in Books
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