Vinny

“You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“It seems funny to think that healing or coming to terms with loneliness and loss, or with the damage accrued in scenes of closeness, the inevitable wounds that occur whenever people become entangled with one another, might take place by means of objects. It seems funny, and yet the more I thought about it the more prevalent it was. People make things – make art or things that are akin to art – as a way of expressing their need for contact, or their fear of it; people make objects as a way of coming to terms with shame, with grief. People make objects to strip themselves down, to survey their scars, and people make objects to resist oppression, to create a space in which they can move freely. Art doesn’t have to have a reparative function, any more than it has a duty to be beautiful or moral. All the same, there is art that gestures towards repair; that, like Wojnarowicz’s stitched loaf of bread, traverses the fragile space between separation and connection.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“I had never met anyone like Sam before. His life revealed to me that if you are poor, and black, with an African surname and a community of poor, black immigrants around you, parents who are not equipped to guide you, a school which expects nothing from you, except a life of crime or low-paid, unskilled labour – because of your race and class – and older children who offer you quick solutions to your safety, by joining gangs, then becoming a lawyer, say, takes something special.”
― Afua Hirsch, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging