Lisa Cook

“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“We would figure out what we liked, what we didn't, what was fun and what was painful through trial and error. If we kept shrinking back, worrying about how others saw us, trying not to show the uncool parts of ourselves or avoid being laughed at, we would probably lose sight of what those things even meant.

That was why, from here on out, step by step, I was going to decide who I was.”
― Michiko Aoyama, The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park

“There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. It is easier for them to let it happen and to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation. No matter how good they are, no matter how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen. There is no amount of loving that will ever bring Miller closer to him in this respect. There is no amount of desire. There will always remain a small space between them, a space where people like Roman will take root and say ugly, hateful things to him. It’s the place in every white person’s heart where their racism lives and flourishes, not some vast open plain but a small crack, which is all it takes. Wallace presses his tongue flat. “Good white people,” he says.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born as the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us. Or maybe it was just the end of one civilisation, ours, and at some point in the future another will take its place. In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You