Charlie Blecker

“No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn't get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“The blacks have a song which says, 'I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.' No American film, relating to blacks, can possibly incorporate this observation.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“It is a terrible thing, simply, to be trapped in one's history, and attempt, in the same motion (and in this, our life!) to accept, deny, reject, and redeem it--and, also, on whatever level, to profit from it.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin, ye shall scent out all the places — whether in church, bed-chamber, street, field, or forest — where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood-spot.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne