The Kingmaker (All the King's Men, #1)

by Kennedy Ryan

“My mother was my first country. The first place I ever lived.” —“lands” by Nayyirah Waheed, poet and activist

On rare occasions, you come across someone who just gets you, and you don’t have to figure out your place. Wherever you are is okay.

“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.” —Henry David Thoreau

Grief is its own kind of intimacy, a bond of sorts between you and the one you lost. No one else feels it the way you do about that person you loved most.

There are few things more affirming than someone seeing you exactly as you aspire to be—for them to say I see that in you.

“Pretty is the least of what she is, but she is that, too.”

I’ve never admired and resented one person so simultaneously as I do my father.

“But it was a game for you, one you played with absolutely no risk while we risked everything.”

“Recognizing their contributions without exposing their shortcomings, the discrepancies between rhetoric of freedom and systemic mistreatment and exclusion of marginalized groups, is a disservice,”

“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” I quote. “I love this country too much to settle for the lies written in our history books. I love the Constitution too much not to hold the men who wrote it accountable for the truth of its principles.”