Dnyria

“Every Negro in America is in one way or another menaced by it. One is bom in a white country, a white Protestant Puritan country, where one was once a slave, where all standards and all the images ... when you open your eyes on the world, everything you see: none of it applies to you.
You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“You have to decide who you are-whether you are black or white-who you are ...
BALDWIN: Yes, who you are. Then the pressure of being black or white is robbed of its power. You can, of course, still be bearen up on the South Side by anybody; I mean, the social menace does not lessen. The world perhaps can destroy you physically. The danger of your destroying yourself does not vanish, but it is minimized.”
― James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“But there was a young lad who had been captivated. His name was Nwoye, Okonkwo's first son. It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul--the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth. Nwoye's callow mind was greatly puzzled.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation