R. Eric Thomas > Quotes

“In every office I’ve worked, word of complimentary cake races through the ranks of the cubicle class like it’s a rumor about the Wells Fargo wagon showing up in River City, Iowa. Free break room cake is a blessing, a gift from some benevolent force that asks nothing of you in return. Free break room cake offers you an opportunity to share a portion of some other person’s joy, both literally and figuratively. In a space built on capitalist power structures, free break room cake reminds you that you don’t need to produce anything to be deserving of a little sweetness.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Congratulations, The Best Is Over!: Essays

“I’m tempted to say that I have a struggle with depression, because that’s the commonly used phrase, but it’s really more of an ongoing partnership than a struggle. Depression just hangs out with me like a lax babysitter who is ambivalent about my bedtime. Depression is a text conversation that ebbs and flows; every once in a while, Depression texts, “Have you seen this meme? It’s going to psychologically wreck you for six months. Brunch soon?” Depression is like Jiminy Cricket riding around on my shoulder, but instead of acting as my conscience, it just mumbles, “You’re bad, things are bad, and nothing will improve.” And at this point I’m just like, “…Okay.” Like, we get it, girl. Thanks!”
― R. Eric Thomas, Congratulations, The Best Is Over!: Essays

“Perhaps the thing that is even more overflowing with possibility than a crush is love. In whatever form it takes, from whatever context it is drawn. With a crush, after all, there are sort of only two outcomes when you get down to it: it will bloom or it will wither. But love? Love seems to have infinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I’ve learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once. Love is a library. And nothing is as fat with possibility as a library.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“We had the easiness that comes from knowing the same stories and knowing which parts you’re supposed to say at what time. I often wonder who the audience is for those stories, the ones everyone gathered has heard every year, the ones most of us lived through. Maybe they’re not for anyone outside of the circle. Maybe the telling is the metronome by which we set the beating of our hearts.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“I tell this story because of what knowledge it began in me—the complexity of love, the shape-shifting heaviness of grief, and the possibility of tragedy. I tell this story because she left before the end and I’m trying to find her in the darkness. And with her, a piece of myself. I tell this story because I believe that somewhere, still, two teenagers are standing outside a library, and their eyes are ringed with tears. And in this place, she hugs me, and I whisper in her ear, and anything is possible, for anyone. Forever.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“We are not going to band together and listen to a bunch of scientists to save humanity like Jake Gyllenhaal in a disaster movie. Sorry. You know how I know? Because a bunch of scientists are telling us how to save the world right now, and half the world isn’t listening to them.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Who am I doing this for and do they want what I want?”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“But they were relentless because they were trying to create the world that they wanted their children to live in.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“That, for a while, seemed like life. And if I was really being honest with myself, I wasn’t into it. The only option was to sit in the pews every Sunday at church and casually wonder if I was going to go to hell because of who I was? No, thank you. Or to understand that the structures on which the country was built were engineered against me? Hard pass. What choice did I have besides constantly code-switching between identities as a means of hiding in plain sight? And wasn’t it just normal to feel like such a mistake as an adult that every time I walked over a bridge or stood on a subway platform, I had to talk myself out of stepping over the edge? I came to believe I was a monster and that I deserved to feel the way I felt. And I didn’t want to turn the page. But through it all there was a constant tethering me to the idea of a future: the library. The library is the place where I could borrow first Grover’s philosophical tome, then a couple of Choose Your Own Adventures I could cheat at, and later a stack of mysteries I could spoil for myself, all attempts to look for some other way of understanding who I was. In the book stacks, I found The Bluest Eye and The Color Purple and Giovanni’s Room and David Rakoff’s Fraud and more. I saw a new vision of Otherness in those books, and the pages kept turning. At the end of every one was a wall waiting to be broken down—a lurch toward becoming—a new paragraph in a story with an ending far different from what I’d ever dared imagine. Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?” The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.” It seems simple but it’s a bold declaration. How many times in life do we receive the message, implicit or explicit, that what we’ve experienced or what we feel isn’t noteworthy or remarkable? The books that I found in the library, ones that I deeply understood and ones that seemed so outside of my experience they might as well have been written in Klingon, all carried the same hopes: to be seen, to be heard, to exist.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“I’m sure I’ll be an anxious old man, and I’ll probably end up lying in my grave going, “Ugh, I feel like there’s something I should be doing right now. I wonder if everyone is angry at me. Oh my God, how long is this going to take? And what happens next?”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“There are probably few more interesting date options than lazily wandering the aisles of a library or a bookstore. Better if you’re getting paid for it. Not that we were on dates or that we were dating. That would be untrue. But if you were inclined to get to know someone, to show them a piece of yourself, to perhaps fall a little bit in love, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better way than by spending hours picking up books, flipping them open, and talking about what you find inside.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Maybe it’s like one of those “heartwarming” race movies where a white person with suspect ideas and a black person become friends and they both learn a lesson about difference except nothing that’s learned is new to the black person, who was just going about their black business when this whole thing started. If you see it that way, please feel free to option this story for an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“in some small way, is a mutual agreement to hope—to hope it will work out until it doesn’t, to hope it won’t hurt too much until it does, to hope that being together is better than being apart, to hope that something beautiful and sustaining will flourish. To make something out of the beauty and the mess. And part of that hope is the belief that the best is waiting out there for us just beyond today’s horizon.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Congratulations, The Best Is Over!: Essays

“Ireally loved her. Isn’t that something? Before I knew myself, before I knew that sexuality was a spectrum, before the difficulties of college and becoming and stepping out into the world, I fell in love with a young woman in high school. We had a friendship that bloomed into a prom date like the culmination of a teen romcom. It’s a simple story. And one that could end right there. Except it doesn’t. Or rather it won’t.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Every family’s story is a tale of becoming, sometimes through oppression, sometimes through achievement, and sometimes simply through the current of time. We were born grasping after freedom, in a house that could not hold us; every day we get closer and closer to our destination, until our features come into view. Soon, everyone further on down the family line can see us from their seats at the table; we’re coming home.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“If I'm not heading toward a place where I can feel joy, then hope in the present has nothing to hold on to.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Congratulations, the Best is Over!

“By the time we moved back to Baltimore, the “Believe” trash cans were long gone and the benches had yet another slogan painted on them. This city has had more eras than Taylor Swift. The slogan that greeted us as we arrived was “Baltimore: the greatest city in America.” And at that point I was like, “Okay, absolutely not.” Babe. This feels like shade. The greatest city? In America?? Better than Chicago? Better than Pawnee, Indiana?! Better than the murder capital of the world, Cabot Cove, Maine? Okay…”
― R. Eric Thomas, Congratulations, The Best Is Over!: Essays

“If this was a parable, I guess the lesson would be that life isn't fair but if you complain sometimes you get free things.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Every family's story is a tale of becoming, sometimes through oppression, sometimes through achievement, and sometimes simply through the current of time. We were born grasping after freedom, in a house that could not hold us; every day we got closer and closer to our destination, until our features come into view. Soon, everyone further on down the family line can see us from their seats at the table; we're coming home.

Set a place for us. We're hungry, we have so much to talk about, and we're coming home.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“For all of love’s complications, I think every couple’s story starts with two strangers who, if they want to survive, must move heaven and hell to reach each other.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“These days we tend to talk about bubbles like they’re bad things. A bubble connotes a lack of awareness of what’s really happening, a disconnect from the real world. But bubbles have transparent walls and gossamer skin that allows sound to permeate.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“But that place in me that compulsively cried to everyone who would listen is still in me; the bad times don't go away just because times are good.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Electra and I laughed at the size of the corsage. It seemed a bit ridiculous. Then again, everything about prom seemed a bit ridiculous: the awkwardness of taking photos in the vestibule of her house, the fact that my parents had followed the limo I rented in their own car with my ambivalent younger brothers and no less than three cameras, like paparazzi. We were embarrassed and happy and eager to get out of there and loving every minute.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“If I don’t know what I want, how will I know if I’ve got it or if it’s lost forever?”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“The problem is doomsday isn’t coming.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“There is not a moment of my day when I am not irate about Love, Actually. It’s the most nihilist romcom ever made. Every single person is making terrible choices except Emma Thompson, and she’s so rightfully sad.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Listening to her taught me about being a human who feels deeply and lives fully.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“It involves a luxury ocean liner. There’s a caftan. Things escalate!”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“The conversations always centered around achievement rather than overcoming. In what I would later realize was a stunning bit of narrative alchemy, my parents taught us black history lessons that weren't remarkable because of all the oppression they involved but because of the extraordinariness of the black people at their center. This would prove to be dramatically different from the rest of reality, which is, let's be honest, an oppression-fest.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“What is more romantic than the sudden revelation of the thing you didn't even dare to hope for?”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays