Claire

“At this moment the phrase “police reform” has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.”
― Robert Lowell

“...the quality of certain scraps of verse which take hold of us and stay in our memories, we do not understand why, at first: all the words being the right words, none of them is conspicuous, and so they all seem inconspicuous, therefore we wonder what it is about them that makes their message take hold.”
― Mark Twain

“There were occasions when Denys, like all men whose minds have encompassed among other things the foibles of their species, experienced misanthropic moments; he could despair of men, but find poetry in a field of rock.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night