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“A little style is a good thing, but you can’t trust a person who won’t be ugly in front of you.”
― Victor LaValle, Big Machine

“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

“The problem is everyone, even Black people, believes that Black poverty is the worst poverty in the world, and Black urban poverty, forget it, and all urban Blackness always scans as poverty, which means people only love us as a fetish. No one is sentimental about poor Black people unless they're wise and country and you could put a photograph of them on a porch with a quilt behind them in a museum.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories

“1. Become people who seek the truth, create value and possess wisdom and enthusiasm. 2. Do not cause trouble to others, and always take responsibility for your own actions. 3. Be considerate and polite, reject violence and value trustworthiness and cooperation. 4. Boldly speak out for your beliefs and act courageously for the sake of truth and justice. 5. Cultivate an enterprising spirit and become respectable leaders of Japan and the world.”
― Daisaku Ikeda, The New Human Revolution - Volume 12