Maureen Sylvester

“Two horrific murders, the first of a black man, the second of a white, form the backdrop to this speech. The first was the lynching of twenty-six-year-old Francis McIntosh in St. Louis. McIntosh was tied to a tree and burned alive. A grand jury being convened, the judge instructed them not to blame the mob, but rather those abolitionists who had stirred things up. He called one out by name—the minister and newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. Lovejoy then fled St. Louis for Alton, Illinois, where the mob killed him anyway. In that trial, the jury chair had been part of the mob and the judge himself was called as a witness for the defense. In neither case was anyone found guilty. The death of the white man, Lovejoy, has a national impact. This is allegedly the moment John Brown decides to devote his life to the eradication of slavery. But both murders affect Lincoln deeply. In his speech, he warns of two possible threats to the republic. The first is found in the lawless actions of the mob, the second in the inevitable rise someday of an aspiring dictator. The gravest peril will come if the mob and the dictator unite.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, Booth

“Once you step out of your world, it doesn’t wait for you. The world he used to know is gone forever.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Someone should write a poem, I thought, about the women. Not just about the men marching bravely to war and dying, but about their wives, their girls, their mothers and sisters and daughters, sitting in silence and screaming into the darkness. Unable to fight, unable to stop it, unable to tell the war to fuck itself. We fought our war, too, it seemed to me, and if it was a war of a different kind, the pain of it was no more bearable. Someone should write a poem about the women.”
― Simone St. James, Lost Among the Living

“Everything’s fine. Everything’s great. But you’re always aware that at any moment, with no warning at all and no way to head it off, you might have to throw clothes over your pajamas and head out into the night, scared out of your mind, to battle whatever demons have come. It’s always this serrated edge of scared for them and because of them, angry at them for getting into trouble and angry at whatever trouble had the audacity to get into it with your kids.”
― Laurie Frankel, Family Family