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That’s why people used books to say important things, because a book assumes an absence, on one side or the other: while it is being written, the reader is missing. While it is being read, the writer is missing. The disgust and abjection that come from putting the judge face-to-face with the condemned thus disappear.

I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.

Gorillas and gods don't know that they will one day die. Only we do.

The Adirondack chair was invented for tuberculosis patients, allowing them to rest outdoors without needing their beds wheeled outside.

At the height of the sanitarium, there were nearly as many beds to treat tuberculosis patients as there were hospital beds for all other illnesses combined.

People who are treated as less than fully human by the social order are more susceptible to tuberculosis. But it's not because of their moral codes or choices or genetics; it's because they are treated as less than fully human by the social order.

"About half of all humans ever born died before the age of five."

The most accurate accounts, estimated by native chroniclers in the years directly following the conquest, suggest that more than 200,000 Aztecs fell during the siege of Tenochtitlán, as well as 30,000 Tlaxcalans. Even by the most conservative estimates, the battle for the Aztec empire ranks, in terms of human life, as the costliest single battle in history.

Could one of my Goodreads librarian friends please add the cover to this book? Thank you!

https://flic.kr/p/2rPK8Mw

The poetic establishment has co-opted contradiction.
And the poetic establishment has not co-opted contradiction.
Are these poems just cumbersome or
are these poems a critique of cumbersomeness?

“A man’s mind is a strange creature for a man to have to live with

It was as if their memory, the memory of all the Corregidora women, was her memory too, as strong with her as her own private memory, or almost as strong.

80% of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the U.S. border are raped on the way. The situation is so common that most of them take contraceptive precautions as they begin the journey north.

"In Nyamata, the displaced Tutsis’ shadow, their true shadow, the shadow that never left them, that ignored the sun’s course through the sky, that clung to them even deep in the night, was fear."

Wow. Now that is a short story opening sentence that grabs attention.

We don't need to be in the same category to be of equal value.

“Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we’re living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?” author Charles Stross asks. “It’s because these guys [tech billionaires] read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map.”

when the tech billionaires and their hangers-on look at the idea of colonialism, they don’t see genocide and exploitation. They see a frontier where they can escape regulation, along with any other consequences for their actions here on Earth.

"The rapacious logic of colonialism pervades the dreams of technological salvation in space."

(The understatement of the book).

The entire US tech industry is overwhelmingly white—68.5% of all people in the field—and overwhelmingly male. Less than 36% of all tech workers are women, only 7.4% are Black, and only 1.7% are Black women.

When you fall in love, my sister said,
it’s like being struck by lightning.

She was speaking hopefully,
to draw the attention of the lightning.

I reminded her that she was repeating exactly
our mother’s formula, which she and I

had discussed in childhood, because we both felt
that what we were looking at in the adults

were the effects not of lightning
but of the electric chair.

Technological salvation is being used as an excuse to steer society in a dangerous direction, in the service of an impossible future. Breaking free of these visions means understanding them. For the tech elite, these are visions of transcendence, of escape. But they hold no promise of escape for the rest of us, only nightmares closing in.

The credence that tech billionaires give to these specific science-fictional futures validates their pursuit of more—to portray the growth of their businesses as a moral imperative, to reduce the complex problems of the world to simple questions of technology, to justify any action they might want to take—all in the name of saving humanity from a threat that doesn’t exist, aiming at a utopia that will never come.

ENSEMBLE

This, or you through glass before hearing it –
Before needs, stillness, nearness, loudly
because the shapelessness of hush
never reaches you.

Through her editorial choices, Morrison emphasized that history is a living, breathing entity shaped by the stories we tell and how we tell them. Publishing these books helped brandish her reputation as a culture worker whose productivity as an editor could be rivaled only by her rising prominence as an important writer.