Kylene Jones

“She taught me that everyone had a story worth listening to. This is another way of saying that everyone has something to teach.”
― Peter Buffett, Life Is What You Make It: Find Your Own Path to Fulfillment

“And that's the problem,' I say. 'Real macaroni and cheese doesn't come from a box, babe. It eventually comes from an oven with a crust bubbling on top.'
'Amen.' Seven holds his fist to me, and I bump it.
'Ohhh,' Chris says. 'You mean the kind with breadcrumbs?'
'What?' DeVante yells, and Seven goes, 'Breadcrumbs?'
'Nah,' I say. 'I mean there's like a crust of cheese on top. We gotta get you to a soul food restaurant, babe.'
'This fool said breadcrumbs.' DeVante sounds seriously offended. 'Breadcrumbs.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“The Second Noble Truth is more hopeful: suffering has an origin. Everything in this world is interdependent, linked in a great chain of cause and effect, so suffering must come from somewhere. Buddhists identify twelve links in this chain of “dependent origination” (pratitya-samutpada) but the key links are ignorance, thirst, and grasping. We suffer because we close our eyes to the way the world really is. We pretend we are independent when we are really interdependent. We pretend that changing things are unchanging. And we desperately desire the world and the people who populate it to be as we imagine it (and them) to be. And so we suffer when our spouses take up new interests, or when our favorite (and perfect just as it was) old-fashioned ice cream store puts up a ridiculous Web site with a stupid new logo, or when the brand new T-bird we are proudly driving home from the Ford dealership is hit by a rock thrown by a six-year-old kid who would go on to write this book (true story). We suffer because we desperately grasp after people, places, and things, as if they can redeem us from our suffering. We suffer because we cling to beliefs and judgments, not least beliefs in gods, and judgments that this friend or that enemy is morally bankrupt. Today “you have changed” is an explanation one lover gives to another as she is walking out the door. In Buddhism, “you have changed” is a description of what is happening every moment of every day. The”
― Stephen R. Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“Alicia Garza, the cofounder of the BLM organization, pushed back against that criticism in an interview. “Standing up for the rights of Black people as human beings and standing against police violence and police brutality makes you get characterized as being anti-police or it has you being characterized as cop killers, neither of which we are.… At the same time that we can grieve the senseless loss of life of five police officers, we are also grieving the senseless loss of life that occurred at the hands of police. Those things can coexist.”
― Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?