Scar

The rain
Never falls upwards.
When the wound
Stops hurting,
What hurts is
The scar.
--Bertolt Brecht

Stories

This is kind of how we get through our lives: we tell ourselves stories so that what's happening becomes something we can live with. Necessary fictions.
--Lidia Yuknavitch

Imagination

The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.
--Amitav Ghosh

To War

And however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us.
--David Wallace-Wells

Citizens

Suddenly I am beginning to realize that Trump may be inadvertently performing a great service for the United States of America. He is forcing citizens of the United States to face our national sins of racism and xenophobia that have been festering since the birth of our country. I have great fear at this time, but I am also filled with hope.
--Ed Pierce

Horror

The casual, unapologetic and ultimately self-destructive violence of white supremacy is the true and enduring horror of American life.
--A. O. Scott

Melanin

The problem of race in America, insofar as that problem is related to packets of melanin in men's skin, is a white problem.
--Lerone Bennett Jr.

Accept

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this--which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never--the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
--James Baldwin

Imagination

Because white men can't police their imagination, black people are dying.
--Claudia Rankine

It

That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real.
--Margaret Atwood

Idiots

Don't try to explain yourself to idiots. You're not the fuckface whisperer.
--Rabih Alameddine

Agitation

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
--Frederick Douglass

Insanity

Insanity is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Pitiless

As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Eat

There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it, and other people who just stand around and watch them do it.
--Lillian Hellman

Miss You

I shall miss you so much when I'm dead.
--Harold Pinter

Light

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is supply light and not heat.
--Woodrow Wilson

Goodness

We live in such cynical and amoral times that goodness looks like naiveté to us.
--J. B. Oklahoma

Terrible

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.
--Michel de Montaigne

Might

I do not believe that things will turn out well, but the idea that they might is of decisive importance.
--Max Horkheimer

Weight

All you can do with the past is carry it around, feeling its weight slowly increase, praying it never crushes you completely.
--Matt Haig

Forever

Forever is composed of Nows.
--Emily Dickinson

Upkeep

Americans have an impoverished and immature conception of technology, one that fetishizes innovation as a kind of art and demeans upkeep as mere drudgery.
--Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel