“There are so many streets like this, where I have been so many different people. If anyone were to ask me why I can't leave even as this city is too hard for not-rich people, I would say it's because I'm too afraid of what would happen to all these different people somewhere else.”
― Want
― Want
“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
“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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“This woman sighs this big, long sigh that I think is supposed to be a sort of compliment-slash-show-of-solidarity between us. I know that if I were to sit with her by ourselves and talk a long time I’d probably like her. My quadrilingual friend is kind and brilliant and exacting and I trust she likes this woman because she is too. But I don’t have the space to sit and talk with her, to listen to and try to like her, so I sit and I allow myself to hate her, because I’m tired and it’s easy.”
― 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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