TAB

“Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. It was for fear of being beaten to this beat that black soldiers avoided the Saigon bars where their white comrades kept the jukeboxes humming with Hank Williams and his kind, sonic signposts that said, in essence, No Niggers.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much. I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word ‘murder’ made us mumble as much as the word ‘masturbation.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“She seemed to be able to turn the accent on and off. She tended to turn it on for comforting people, and for threatening to kill them.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Perhaps I did not always love him so well as I do now. But in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice