Alec Downie

“On the wall at Elizabeth's office they had a map of the United States and the Caribbean with pins and red marker to indicate the cities and towns and routes that Black Star promoted. Stay on the path and you'll be safe, eat in peace, sleep in peace, breath in peace and beware. Work together and you can subvert their evil order. It was a map if the black nation inside the white world, part of the bigger thing but its own self, independent, with its own constitution. If we did not help one another we'd be lost out there.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“I suppose that the most heroic expression that I have ever seen was on the face of a certain tough-looking, brutalized, slum-slaughtered woman at Coney Island. She had her arm around a girl child who looked hardly less brutalized and slum-slaughtered - "We is going to have a good time tonight!" the look said.”
― Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: An Informal Autobiography

“A tawdry realm of shifting, insecure employment and fleeting glimpses of high reward for little effort. A world where strings are pulled by complete cretins while those who work hard at the creative coalface are at the bottom of a steaming dunghill of vacuity, broken dreams, and empty promises.”
― Kevin Armstrong, Absolute Beginner: Memoirs of the world's best least-known guitarist

“I've done everything from helping old people to pee to taking out their garbage to chasing their escaped pets. We are the poor man's ambulance, and we are also, sad to say, the poor man's priest, our cab the confessional in which people litmus-test their wildest fears and prejudices.”
― Lee Durkee, The Last Taxi Driver