Bethany Creed

“I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“To tolerate existence, we lie, and we lie above all to ourselves. Sometimes we tell ourselves lovely tales, sometimes petty lies. Falsehoods protect us, mitigate suffering, allow us to avoid the terrifying moment of serious reflection, they dilute the horrors of our time, they even save us from ourselves.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“Slowly, I was discovering myself. I found that I liked the pain of confusion, that I liked the incoherence between Wright and Hurston, that I cared more about the search for royalty than about the discovery itself. And this, too, I traced back to Malcolm, who seemed to always be searching and who sloughed off old ideologies as new facts were brought before him.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates