Kathleen Daughety

“I think my generation,” she said, “many getting killed, and beaten, and spit on, and dogs, and hoses, did not understand that you have to keep telling the story in order for people to understand. Each generation has to know the story of how we got where we are today, because if you don’t understand, then you are in the position to go back to it.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Write,” instructs Annie Dillard, “as if you were dying.” We are all terminal patients on this earth—the mystery is not “if” but “when” death appears in the plotline.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“But I was beginning to learn something very important: when institutions don’t want to do something, to claim that something is a “safety” issue is an easy argument to fall back on. It sounds so benign and protective. How could caring about safety possibly be wrong or discriminatory?”
― Judith Heumann, Being Heumann: The Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist

“I understood now why so many writers and artists, while in the thick of illness, became memoirists. It provided a sense of control, a way to reshape your circumstances on your own terms, in your own words. “That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is,” Jeanette Winterson wrote. “It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted