D.E. Eliot > D.E.'s Quotes

“And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.”
― Kiersten White, The Chaos of Stars

“If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

[Commencement Address at American University, June 10 1963]”
― John F. Kennedy

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.”
― Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay

“The hardest thing to do is to be true to yourself especially when everybody is watching”
― Dave Chappelle

“In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“These spinning rooms leave us with so much to ponder, so much to remember, nothing left to regret. It doesn’t matter how we began, only how we forget.”
― D.E. Eliot, Ruined

“I laughed slightly and it sounded pure. I continued to get all of this mess off my chest while I could, “I find it telling, don’t you, that whenever you ask a man what type of woman he seeks or wants, his description always resembles the traits of a slave.”
― D.E. Eliot, Own Son

“They want you to support their goals while you put your hopes and dreams on the back burner. They swear they’ll be there for you until your dying days. Then all of a sudden, after doing all of that for them to succeed, they find a younger version of you to love. A younger you who isn’t emotionally careworn and battle fatigued. A younger you that doesn’t have stretch marks on their belly. A younger you with perky boobs that hang in the right place even after they take their bra off. I don’t want to be some man’s stepping stone to the next woman he’s going to love. I don’t want to be some guy’s stepladder, when I can carefully climb over the same wall without his damn help.”
― D.E. Eliot, Own Son

“At our church, there’s a saying, “you got the wrong vision,” which basically means you can’t see how good God is being because you’re too busy out there sinning. It also means, depending on the context, to shut the hell up talking to me like you’re crazy. No matter how you use the phrase, it really does have a way of getting the point across. For example: if a woman asked you for some money when she knows you got a house full of kids, an out-of-work husband, and a greedy, pedophile-looking landlord snipping at your heels, that’s when you hit them with, “Girl, you got the wrong vision.” As crazy as it sounds, it really is the nicest way to tell someone to fuck off.”
― D.E. Eliot, Own Son

“I had to watch my uncle get strung up when I was a child,” she finally said after she returned from the faraway place in her mind. “The white man would only sell us the rotten fruit and vegetables from their bug-infested baskets. We had to collect that mess from the back of the store like we were a pack of wild mutts picking through garbage. My uncle had had enough of his apples having maggots crawling out of them, so he started farming his own vegetables for us to eat. The white man didn’t like that. Not. One. Bit. It’s amazing how their minds work. The way their minds work is the reason we call them devils because only a devil could think the way they do. They were mad about the loss of profit because they no longer had us buying the filthy rot they peddled.
“My uncle produced such a high quality of fruits and vegetables that he had white folks coming to buy from him. It wasn’t too long after this started, those devils came in their white hoods and burned his garden to ash. Then they strung him up. We were forced to watch my uncle dangle from the neck while he pissed and shit himself. God will forgive my mouth saying it because he knows I only speak the truth. The evilness that resides inside the mind of those devils still exists in the minds of the ones who wear cop’s uniforms and judge’s robes. This is what our boys are up against. Our boys are at war! They freed us from our chains, so that they could lock us in their jails.”
― D.E. Eliot, Own Son

“Life in the black community has a different set of rules than the perfect America our schoolbooks go on about. Black people don’t live in that schoolbook America. Where we live, we are underpaid and over-policed, but at the same time, they expect us to work harder and longer just to get half of what they already got. It’s like they wanted us to eat dog shit, yet, they never allowed us to own dogs.”
― D.E. Eliot, Own Son