Claire
https://www.goodreads.com/clairemwilliams
when my brothers & i asked for video games, the church gave us books. we were too poor to want what we wanted.
“Maybe the trick is not to define yourself as a container for your experiences, your thoughts. Maybe it's to assume you are larger than the things you have felt over a series of years, that your history is not a list of things your body has done or been present for, that your family is not people who you spent a lot of time around as a child or carry your genetic code. Maybe the trick is to push violently at your own boundaries, to find your own contradictions, and use your teeth and nails to destroy what separates you from something else.
I am trying.”
― The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries
I am trying.”
― The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries
“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.”
― Between the World and Me
― 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.”
―
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.”
―
“...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.”
―
―
“And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.”
― Between the World and Me
― Between the World and Me
Claire’s 2025 Year in Books
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