Laurie

“Now all we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“Soon they'll be grown-up. Mothers have no armor to get them through life because they give every last bit to their children, by the end of their teenage years there isn't even any skin left, so every feeling of loss cuts right into her flesh now.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“The dangerously clear logic of the Negro's position will more and more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it so largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such waste of energy cannot be spared if the South is to catch up with civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood. And finally, when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin abortions; that color and race are not crimes, and yet it is they which in this land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South, and West.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

“How can I be so captured by my own imagination that I can truly connect both to the person I'm playing and to the person I'm playing with...
I didn't know it, but what I was really looking for was compassion. Not consciously, of course. I didn't consciously want to become compassionate. Who in his right mind would want to give up his place at the center of the universe. Compassion is scary. If you open up too much to people, they have power over you and make you do things for them. Better to keep them at a distance, keep them on the other side of the footlights. Learn to juggle - learn to fall down in funny ways. Keep them as an audience where you can be in control. Keep the curtain up, keep the play going. It holds off judgment. See me up here? You love me, right? I'm the best, right? But if I wanted really to act, I was going to have to find the doorway to compassion...”
― Alan Alda