Jacob

“It was once said that the poor are “constantly exposed to evidence of their own irrelevance.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“No one understands a stranger’s tragedy, God willing you might understand your own.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

“When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. "We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Yes, but I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialectics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking academese instead of English and they don’t really know what’s happening in the real world.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah