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To be black is to bear the brunt of selective enforcement of the law, and to inhabit a psychic unsteadiness in which there is no guarantee of personal safety.
American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It can hoard its malice in great stillness for a long time, all the while pretending to look the other way. Like misogyny, it is atmospheric. You don’t see it at first. But understanding comes.
Many are the moments of imaginative sympathy that continue to bloom in the mind long after the page is turned.
Grief is a frightening condition, and at its extreme is like the sun: impossible to look at directly.
All I want is to be dragged down into a space of narrative that I haven’t been in before, into a place where, as you say, a truth is created.
There is no way to leave history. There is no other place to go.
it may be the function of my age that I increasingly find myself considering the possibility that the whole project of humanity is winding down and the end of it all is on the horizon of possibilities.
What is dark is neither blank nor empty. It is in fact full of wise light, which, with patient seeing, can open out into glories.
What is hard is being vividly immersed in our own pain.
Along the way, I felt the constant company of doubt: my lack of talent, my impostor’s syndrome, my fear of boring others.
Fernweh is a longing to be away from home, a desire to be in faraway places.
I had been trying to stay pure, to have the correct idea, and had made the best the enemy of the good.
we participate in things not because they are ideal but because they are not.
“The purification of the emotions by vicarious experience” is how the OED defines “catharsis.” The word has a strong purgative association. The need for this cleansing is unquestionable, given the sheer quantity of impacted bullshit in politics.
The world would surely change. The bells were already ringing. No, no, the world would do no such thing: power would eternally perpetuate itself. Greed would still ride roughshod over everything, and money and ego would still poison brother against brother. That was what reality actually looked like.
We praise literature in self-evident terms: it is better to read than not to read, for reading civilizes us, makes us less cruel, and brings the imaginations of others into ours and vice versa.
RELIGION IS CLOSE to theater; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing.
no generation is free of the demands of conscience, and no citizenry can shirk the responsibility of calling the state’s abuse of power to account.
The historical suffering of Jewish people is real—it is in fact one of the most uncontroversially horrific instances of persecution in human experience—but it does not in any way justify the present oppression of Palestinians by Israeli Jews.
The case that is being made, and that must continue to be made to all people of conscience, is that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is criminal.
Things happen quickly, and they happen all the time.
About death, as usual, one can only resort to the cliché: it is final.
This, too, is my America: people wandering in the desert in fear of their lives. At this very moment they are there. There are people in the desert, a never-ending migration.
