Rayroy

“He fell into a stillness then, remembering clenched fists, and sit-ins, and pot smoke wafting on the breeze. And power to the people. And the hope, the abiding expectation, that things could be better, that you could, if you wanted it bad enough, if you worked for it hard enough, force this old world to change. Where did it all go? he wondered. When did it all change? When did we all get so small? . . . It wasn't so long ago, explained Malcolm, that you and I wouldn't have been here arguing over who was the bigger victim. It wasn't so long ago that white guys just like you were putting themselves on the line, and even dying, because they knew that unless everybody was free, nobody was. I just wonder sometimes, how we got from people like that to people like you. . . . Small-minded people. Hateful, closed-minded, self-righteous, damned ignorant, and proud of it. We were not like that. And white people were not like that, when I was your age. . . . Yeah, he said, there was drugs and there was sex, but there was also vision. We had ambition, not for making money, but for making a difference.”
― Leonard Pitts Jr., Grant Park

“She said my glasses made me look like a butch jock's locker room bitch.”
― Nenia Campbell, Bound to Accept

“I consider my work optimistic in that the people, during the period I’m writing about them, are experiencing intense emotion. It is my belief that this is all there is to it.”
― Don Carpenter

“Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy