Edward Moreta > Recent Status Updates

“People ask me to offer them hope, but I’d rather offer them honesty”

“I am losing faith in the idea that grief can become anything but grief”

“It is easiest to think about gentrification in terms of what once was standing and what no longer is. But I think of it more often as a replacement of people and their histories… for this, I love the hoods that still stand, no matter the cost to remain standing”

“Winning sometimes means you can opt out of whatever violence comes for you next”

“It’s easier to circle someone in an endless waltz of volume and eye contact than it is to tell them that they’ve made you very plainly sad”

“When your mark is your own, defined by rules of your own making, you build the boat wide enough for your people and whatever you need to survive. You save yourself first”

“Excellence, too, is showing up when it is easier for you not to be present, especially when one would notice you being gone”

“But the idea of this Black Excellence that I keep returning to is what a person does when faced with these alternatives. What better living is seen beyond the living currently constructed”

“And so sometimes, it is simply about alternatives. What marginalized people can do with the space we make our own until some else makes it theirs”

“Commodify into silence”

"Beyonce Performs at the Super Bowl and I think about all of the jobs I’ve hated" felt like some of the best yet..

"But the actual, living needs of the Green Book don’t vanish as long as there are still some places in America where Black people are less safe"

"The love I have to give is malleable, but it has its limits. All of our love has its limits, and it should"

“There are many ways to be of a place, and there are many ways to fade into the architecture of the landscape, until you draw the frustration of it”

“For as long as there is a future, there will be Black people in it, hopefully surviving in even newer and better ways than we are now.”

“There is a way that the book is speaking to what those in vulnerable and marginalized positions have always known: survival is sometimes how to adapt until something better arrives”

“I don’t have any solution for this, but it has often seemed to me that even nodding and keeping it moving is an act of love when faced with the alternative of publicly debating the small or large nuances of specific modes of Blackness. And to not, in turn, make yourself a victim of Black people for the sympathy of a white audience”

“I am thinking often on how crucial it is to love Black people even when feeling indicted by them. Even when that indictment is not out of love (which of course it sometimes is), but out of them clocking you for a standard you are not capable of rising to.”

“And while we are here with our hands in the aesthetics, I wish you would talk more about how frightening it all is. By you, I suppose I mean anyone, but let’s say I mean you, non-Black reader or scholar of history.”

“The thing I find myself explaining most vigorously to people these days is that consumption and love are not equal parts of the same machine. To consume is not to love, and ideally love is not rooted solely in consumption.”

“It is almost impossible for anyone with any semblance of rhythm to make a mistake if they just move in the direction the room is already carrying them in, and I suppose that is something like love, or something like trust.”

“And no one knows what to make of this, really. What to do when someone has committed themselves to sympathy, but not to mercy.”

“And no one knows what to make of this, really. What to do when someone has committed themselves to sympathy, but not to mercy”

“It would be humorous or fascinating if it wasn’t so suffocating. I would laugh if I was not being smothered by the violence of imagination”

“According to the rules of the Prestige, the magic trick doesn’t work if that which was vanished never reappears. If in place of the vanishing is more vanishing…” love this. entire paragraph goes on to build itself so beautifully

love the opening section of “On Going Home as Performance

“Every place you go to—when you are there you feel it is so far from anywhere else, in certain moods. In other moods I feel I can just rise up, almost out of my body and be anywhere else, or everywhere else. Do you know, have you felt that simultaneity?”

“Why do we try to honor things by pretending they are anything like other things?”

“I have read some books of philosophy in which the freedom of burdens is explained, that somehow we are all seeking some appropriate burden. Until we find it, we are horribly shackled, can in fact scarcely live”

ending to an incredible couple of paragraphs. very moving.

“It seems to me that there is an excellence in discrimination—in telling one thing apart from another, in being able to break a thing down into parts and see it simultaneously as its parts, and as a whole—and to do this for all things that one sees, to be simultaneously examining both train and branch, to see the pore the limb the leap all together”