Lisa Cook

“The classroom is a place of high drama. You'll never know what you've done to, or for, the hundreds coming and going. You see them leaving the classroom: dreamy, flat, sneering, admiring, smiling, puzzled. After a few years you develop antennae. You can tell when you've reached them or alienated them. It's chemistry. It's psychology. It's animal instinct. You are with the kids and, as long as you want to be a teacher, there's no escape. Don't expect help from the people who've escaped the classroom, the higher-ups. They're busy going to lunch and thinking higher thoughts. It's you and the kids. So, there's the bell. See you later. Find what you love and do it.”
― Frank McCourt, Teacher Man

“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

“I honestly don't know what's happened to you," Ellen continued. "When you were little you had all these interests. It was such a thrill, as your mother, to watch you doing your things, and imagine the person you'd grow up to be. And I'm not talking about some hotshot success at the top of his field - just a person who was engaged in the world, who had a thing he was passionate about doing. I want that for you, George, I want you to wake up in the morning and be excited to get out of bed and do whatever it is that you're passionate about. Or at least get out of bed and do it, even on the days you're not excited about it. I think you'd find there's a certain dignity in that, just getting up and doing what's expected of you, all the more so when it's not what you want to be doing, or what you expected out of life.”
― Kate Greathead, The Book of George