Elaine

“Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.”
― China Miéville, Looking for Jake and Other Stories

“Hearing them, I realised that they weren't all at smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“Years later, after I’d met and married my husband—a man who is light-skinned to some and dark-skinned to others, who speaks like an Ivy League–educated black Hawaiian raised by white middle-class Kansans—I’d see this confusion play out on the national stage among whites and blacks alike, the need to situate someone inside his or her ethnicity and the frustration that comes when it can’t easily be done. America would bring to Barack Obama the same questions my cousin was unconsciously putting to me that day on the stoop: Are you what you appear to be?”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming