Smita Jalaf

“You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“The point is, you never know what you can do until you really put yourself out there and try. Do it. Whatever it is. Challenge yourself. If you can’t imagine the finish line, the first step is to just show up. And don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. Run your own race.”
― Angie Martinez, My Voice: A Memoir

“And so you became the worst kind of immigrant. You talked of the good old days. You compared the prices and outside temperatures of everything to Kenya. You cursed the influx of immigrants as my cousins and I flocked around you in a ready-made community. You would even go as far as to quote Margaret Thatcher. To think that you, an immigrant yourself who had been hard done by her and those who came before, used her to score points against the next wave. I loved you still but you became difficult to live with. You switched from drinking to chewing tobacco although you didn’t actually chew”
― Nikesh Shukla, The One Who Wrote Destiny

“That means all you do is see me as a girl going to hang out with a bunch of dudes. That’s not how I see myself. I’m not some chick that’s going to go running up there in, like, a tube top and short shorts, trying to fuck Tupac. That’s not what this is. If that’s what you think, you don’t respect me, you don’t respect what I’m trying to do, and you don’t understand my intention, my goal. The fact that you would even jump to that is offensive to me.”
― Angie Martinez, My Voice: A Memoir