Samuel > Recent Status Updates

Schizophrenia is a brain disease, not God’s punishment.

Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald, 1932. Like her husband's novel Tender Is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz is a thinly disguised description of her experience with schizophrenia and her family's reaction to her illness. Written in 1932, shortly after her second breakdown, the novel describes a young woman's delirium after she is hospitalized

“Suffering is bad enough, but permanent invisibility is even worse. It mitigates the horror, in some mysterious way, when it is witnessed, recorded, transfigured.”

“He told her how much he loved her and that he would die for her. Cut his throat swim in a river of thrashing crocodiles fight lions for her pussy.”

“To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task.”

“My parents—” Deborah said. She knew that they had seen more of her hatred than her love, but they had let her stay. They had let her stay without a sign of improvement for a long, long time. They had never demanded of her a recovery”

“You know…the thing that is so wrong about being mentally ill is the terrible price you have to pay for survival.”

“and boarded the plane carrying three books—the Bible, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State, and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner”

We seek the attention of the world from the moment we are born. An extrovert is just an introvert trying to prove they are not.

“The Breadbasket plan particularly appealed to Jesse Jackson, a ministerial student and Chicago staffer who had had his first exposure to SCLC as one of the thousands who made the spring pilgrimage to Selma.”

An adoption agency asks whether ‘Ethiopian means he is negroid or not’.

Then came the news that Kennedy was dead. King was quiet for a few moments, Coretta remembered, "but finally he said,
"This is what is going to happen to me. This is such a sick society!"

“When he talked, he just radiated so much charm.. he became much better looking as he talked.”

Lmao Coretta petty af

“Dance is the universal art, the common joy of expression.Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own ego and cannot live well with other people and the world. They have lost the tune of life.“

Mistletoe alert! 🪓

Raif Efendi, what is inside this notebook 👀

My mama raised me on Soul on Ice and The Autobiography of Malcolm X; the lyrical swagger and intellectual prowess flowed from Black Panthers and Black scholars with such ease.

“The pastor said something along the lines of slavery being bad but also really helpful—a blessing—for the economic infrastructure of white people.”

I remember this, felt like a real life boondocks episode 😭

Toni Morrison put it in earthier tones when she wrote in Song of Solomon, “You wanna fly, you got to give up the $*!t that weighs you down.”

“I have all these weird early memories. I remember my parents reading Ulysses out loud to each other in bed, in this really cool way, holding hands and both lovin' something really fiercely.”

“Our city slogan used to be ‘the city that reads,’ and people changed it to ‘the city that breeds’ because we had such a high teen-pregnancy rate,”

"I'm glad to see a young person who still enjoys reading good books," she would say. "Nowadays no one seems to want to read anything worthwhile any more."

to love is to die. And, as Sylvia Path said, dying is an art.

“Because I can't live like this, in this pain anymore? I didn't want to be a strong Black woman. I didn't want to be Dear Mama.”

"He lifted his hand and I flinched. And I hated myself for being so weak."

“I paid dearly for being a bitch," she tells me. "I confused anger with strength and ran everybody off. At least that's what Pac used to tell me."
Afeni imitates Tupac: "My mother is being so manly?' He used to tell people that shit and I dealt with that until the very end.

“I first saw the famous picture of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy lynched in Mississippi for talking to a white woman. Jet magazine printed the photograph of Emmett in his casket. His face was grotesque, from having been beaten and shot in the head and thrown in the river. Kids in the neighborhood were passing the picture around, talking about how a boy our age got lynched.”

the price of creation is never too high. the price of living with other people always is.