el

“I therefore hope you will pray about your problems in front of the Gohonzon. When we take our problems to the Gohonzon and chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, courage wells forth and hope begins to shine in our hearts. “Faith for overcoming obstacles” is the same as “prayer for overcoming obstacles” and “chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo for overcoming obstacles.”
― Daisaku Ikeda, The Five Eternal Guidelines of the Soka Gakkai

“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”
― Toni Morrison

“Such was his level of charm that it was hard to be disgusted by it: Nick expected a door to open and it did; he expected to be adored and he was. Before Nick, I had been eating at the same three restaurants and drinking at the same two bars for years because it spared me the exhaustion of walking into a new place and convincing them I belonged and they should treat me kindly, of greeting clerks and waitpersons in my PhD voice, dropping the name of the university when necessary, generously overtipping. It was revelation to move through the world with Nick, to see how little attention a white man needed to devote to that kind of performance, how much of his worry about how other people saw him could be consumed by the frivolous, how easy it was for me to be assumed respectable merely by association.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories

“Why did Justice really always wear a blindfold? I knew now. It was because the cunning bitch had dollar signs for eyeballs”
― Iceberg Slim, Pimp: The Story of My Life