Kate

“I got as far as Berlin. I put my signature on the Reichstag: “I, Sofya Kuntsevich, came here to kill war.” When I see a common grave, I kneel before it. Before every common grave…always on my knees…”
― Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II

“Hobbies are a way of staying present so humans do not have to think about death. Yet the inevitable looms and grows.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland

“The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“We spend so much time urging children to trust us to help them with their problems. Yet we don’t even have the courage to let them read books in which those problems are named for what they are, or to let them freely talk about those problems. So the question I have is this: Why should children trust us? That’s the part that I think the censors have not thought through carefully.”
― Leonard S. Marcus, You Can't Say That! Writers for Young People Talk About Censorship, Free Expression, and the Stories They Have to Tell