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“Do you feel that we can rebel against our oppressors without losing our love, our tolerance and our ability to love?”

“Part of my fate as a greedy, acquisitive reader is that I can never escape the overbearing presence of books, whether in the mind or in the shelf.
I wonder if, without them, I’d have any thoughts at all. Or if I’d be anyone at all.

Reading was an escapism of a kind, but not in the conventional sense. It was a way to get far away from my life, and to feel not better, but simply so different.”

"The fear of forgetting: the main obsession of all those who have passed through the universe of the damned. The enemy relied on people's disbelief and forgetfulness."

Conventionality is not morality- Charlotte Brontë

I am not enslaved, but by showing the living what the dead went through, I live a scary and unsettling past. I feel like a doorway for all the spirits of the plantations I visit. I feel their souls passing through me as I cook and tell their stories. At the end of the day, I feel like a terminal and less like a man who is breathing and aware.

"Man is seldom content to witness beauty. He must possess it"

-Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare, Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea

I am about a third of the way through this book and it is compelling stuff. Very well researched and written.

It's an easy metaphor for the "two" Souths-one black, one white-intertwined and complicated. The storm of history-from Africa to America, slavery to freedom, Middle Passage to this, our now-is not trivia. It is in every cell of our bodies.

The connection between and heritage of both Southern and soul cuisines is hotly debated and arouses old racial stereotypes, prejudices, and cultural attitudes and intercultural misunderstandings

...being queer, I learned, is so much more than who you sleep with. It's who you are, whether that means rejecting traditional gender roles or embracing non-normative identities and politics.

...but not knowing whether we'd be able to make next month's rent didn't ease my mind either. We had our asylum and our government-issues blankets, but I still didn't feel free to be a child.

I wanted to scream "I'm going back to Pakistan!" or cry out for my dad as my toddler brother had taken to doing, but I held my tongue. I didn't want to sound ungrateful; I knew how difficult it had been to arrange this move. But to me it seemed we'd simply traded one set of anxieties for another. Sure, we were no longer afraid of being killed by religious extremists on our way to school....

I would inhale the sweet, heady scent of the roses and touch their silky petals, and for a brief moment Canada felt familiar- like home, I could take refuge in the pistil, the anther, and the rosebuds, because there was continuity in those details. Roses I could be sure of.

..often I spent time in the park alone, lingering among the rose bushes. The smell reminded me of lying in our lush garden back home, where I would water the roses during the hot summer months and think to myself, This is where I would like to die Maybe that was a morbid thought for a kid my age, but not so surprising for someone who so deeply craved permanency- after all, what was more permanent than death?

I wanted to run up to her, ask her if she was married or if she had kids, if she was happy. But if I asked her all that, she'd probably want to ask about me too, and I didn't want to talk about myself. I didn't want her to see me as I was in my uniform and my work shoes. Sometimes people have a way of looking at you that makes you feel you have to explain yourself.

The only love Red knew was that simple, uncomplicated, lonely love one feels for oneself in the quiet moments of the day. It was there. steady and solid in the laughter and talk of the television and with her in the grocery aisles on the weekends. It was there, every night, in the dark, spectacular and sprawling in the quiet. And it all belonged to her.

I chose this book as part of Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge. This fits #16 Read an own voices book about disability.

#OwnVoices is a term coined by the writer Corinne Duyvis, and refers to an author from a marginalized or under-represented group writing about their own experiences/from their own perspective, rather than someone from an outside perspective writing as a character from an underrepresented group.

I picked this book for the book challenge I joined- Bookriot's Read Harder 2021 that works for task#1-Read a book you've been intimidated to read I think the reason I put off reading Middlemarch up to this point is because of its' length (900 pages,) and because I perceived the book as very grown-up and subtle, which makes me laugh when I think about it.

He finds himself crossing things out in his journal as if he imagines some future person poring over it in detail, as if he wants the future person to know which ideas he thought better of.

As a child Marianne resisted, but now she simply detaches, as if isn't of any interest to her, which in a way it isn't. Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter's frigid and unlovable personality. She believes Marianne lacks "warmth," by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hater her.