Ellen

“You can’t accuse the Germans, or at least Berliners, or at least intellectuals in Berlin, or at least the intellectuals at the Freie Universität that I came to know—you see? I learned from them to qualify my statements down to the point of the granite and the unassailable—of trying to pretend the Nazis never happened. They even guard against the idea of getting angry at having to be so thoughtful and conscience-stricken all the time. There’s a kind of unwavering discipline about their watchfulness about conscience fatigue. Consciousness fatigue. Conscientiousness—no; they wouldn’t say conscientiousness; that suggests something of ‘good manners.’ They’re almost brutal to themselves in their unwillingness to feel good about the fact that they remember to feel bad about the evils committed in the past, before they were born. They admit their lack of discipline and prosecute it even when it’s not there. We could learn a thing or two from them about how to address the legacy of slavery, or the treatment of Native Americans, or the Japanese internment camps, or Jim Crow, or the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, or any number of atrocious episodes that leave a stain on the soul of America.”
― Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

“You speak to people, but you don’t know who’s listening to you. But you come into their homes and make them happy anyway.” “I don’t know about happy, but they certainly feel like they have some company.” “Isn’t that the same thing?” Tying the girl’s thin braids in the mirror, Yui felt her eyes prickle with tears.”
― Laura Imai Messina, The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

“I smiled at her. “I know. The greatest privilege of being born at the top is that you never have to think about how to get there.”
― Mansi Shah, The Taste of Ginger

“It’s perhaps telling that the United States for years was, embarrassingly, the only country in the world besides Somalia and South Sudan that had not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. That has now changed: the United States is the only nation that hasn’t bothered”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope