Peter > Peter's Quotes

“There should be a word for the ability to stop crying about a past pain even though it's still in you. There should be a word for living.

Yes, that's it. There should be a word for continuing to live when a part of you has died. There should be a word that sums that up. And the longer you live, the more that word should become a part of you. Because the thing of it is, every day that the person is missed feels longer and there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing you can do to share the long, beautiful days which they are not a part of.”
― Jason Mott, People Like Us

“Can't we just stay here? Now? In this time?"
     She's a child again. Years and years away from that gun.
     "No," she says. She's sixteen again. Dressed in that dress again. "You can't fix the world," she says. "You can't fix time. People like us, we feel it too much. We want to fix too much. And, sometimes, it just swallows us up."
     "People like us?" he says. He is in Minnesota. He is in Bolton. In France, in Italy, in Toronto. He is everywhere he's been and will be.
     "Of course. Why else do you think you're writing this?”
― Jason Mott, People Like Us

“Sometimes, you are blessed with a moment where all the dissembling, all the shame, all the politesse are stripped, and evil speaks with clarity. Sometimes it’s in a park named for a nineteenth-century slave trader. And sometimes it’s in a settlement that honors a twentieth-century advocate of that same system. In either case, the clarity is a gift and we should listen close.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“though when the old men find us, they scold me with one outstretched finger, the same one I use to reinvent the world.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“Once we allow for the idea that depression is a liar, it makes sense to seek other opinions.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Now, however, on hard days, I can look at death kindly and not feel it as a beckoning force, but a gentle, distant rain sweeping toward me from the west, a rain I will find soaking the parched earth at my feet one day. One day. And I can think of that inevitable day without frantically trampling through the fields of flowers ahead of me while rushing to meet those curtains of falling water.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“But as a friend once told me, “Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection