“I think now that if I met them on the street I would find them completely fine and bland, just people. I would find them stunted and a little sad. They wouldn’t make me angry. It’s only because they are the place where the word “love” was built for me that I feel such fury toward them, that each time I get too close, I get so mad.”
― Want
― Want
“sometimes violences are small and subtle, but that only makes them harder to make sense of, to figure out how they might be forgiven, how one might make amends for them later on.”
― Want
― Want
“We have different values is a thing I sometimes tell people when they ask about my parents, but that sounds already more subjective, more judgemental, than I mean. We are very different, very separate people, who have both accidentally and on purpose hurt and love one another poorly and intensely my whole life.”
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“That what my students do need—an obliteration of the same systems I grew up in, a burning down and re-creation of the spaces that I relied on all these years to keep me safe—I can’t do and don’t know how to.”
― Want
― Want
“9/11 happened my second week of college; the financial crisis came the year after we met. It would be years before we understood the implications of these chasms; we weren’t formed enough to see them, were too safe to feel their first round of hits. We made so many choices based on what we thought the world was, what it wasn’t any longer, what we’d been told it was but what we finally understand that it had never been.”
― Want
― Want
Skokie Public Library
— 101 members
— last activity Apr 10, 2023 08:50AM
This was the online book club for Skokie Public Library from 2020-2023!
Niswat’s 2025 Year in Books
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