Carly > Carly's Quotes

“At the beginning of a game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“She understands, too, the loneliness of parenting, which is the loneliness of memory—to know that she connects a future unknowable to her parents with a past unknowable to her child.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“She'd learned that the beginning of one's life mattered the most, that life was top-heavy that way.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“You know how every once in awhile you look back on your life and you wonder how so much time has passed? You wonder how each moment bled into the next and created the days, months, and years that now all feel like seconds?”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, One True Loves

“We're the unknown Americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they've been told they're supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we're not that bad, maybe even that we're a lot like them. And who would they hate then?”
― Cristina Henriquez, The Book of Unknown Americans

“For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it's too late.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“When he left us, he stole all the words.”
― Alex George, Setting Free the Kites

“Once he'd asked his mom, "Why doesn't half white equal white the way half black equals black?" Her answer, i.e., the history of the one-drop rule, etc., made sense but didn't satisfy him. Factually he was just as white as he was black.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, A Good Neighborhood

“Some of us thought, Why should having sex be regarded as an act of impurity? What did impure even mean? What was pure, and why was it so desirable for a girl to be that, while boys could be however they liked?”
― Therese Anne Fowler, A Good Neighborhood

“Why couldn't we see one another as simply human and pull together, for goodness' sake? The planet was dying while people fought over things like who was most American-or who was American at all.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, A Good Neighborhood

“Tree's are life. Not just my life", she would add, since her fields were forests and ecology, "but life period. They literally make oxygen. We need to keep at least seven trees for every human the planet, or else people are going to start suffocating. Think of that.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, A Good Neighborhood

“Do not let what you think they think of you make you stop and question everything you are.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“The one I wore to kill Jabba (my favorite moment in my own personal film history), which I highly recommend your doing: find an equivalent of killing a giant space slug in your head and celebrate that.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“I'm afraid that if I stop writing I'll stop thinking and start feeling.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“Movies were meant to stay on the screen, flat and large and colorful, gathering you up into their sweep of story, carrying you rollicking along to the end, then releasing you back into your unchanged life. But this movie misbehaved. It leaked out of the theater, poured off the screen, affected a lot of people so deeply that they required endless talismans and artifacts to stay connected to it.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions. Regardless of whether a parent told you that everyone was equal, or the poster in the hall of your white suburban school proclaimed the value of diversity, or you have traveled abroad, or you have people of color in your workplace or family, the ubiquitous socializing power of white supremacy cannot be avoided. The messages circulate 24-7 and have little or nothing to do with intentions, awareness, or agreement. Entering the conversation with this understanding is freeing because it allows us to focus on how--rather than if--our racism is manifest. When we move beyond the good/bad binary, we can become eager to identify our racist patterns because interrupting those patterns becomes more important than managing how we think we look to others.

I repeat: stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don't have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing. An honest accounting of these patterns is no small task given the power of white fragility and white solidarity, but it is necessary.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“The United States was founded on the principle that all people are created equal. Yet the nation began with the attempted genocide of Indigenous people and the theft of their land. American wealth was built on the labor of kidnapped and enslaved Africans and their descendants. Women were denied the right to vote until 1920, and black women were denied access to that right until 1964. The term identity politics refers to the focus on the barriers specific groups face in their struggle for equality. We have yet to achieve our founding principle, but any gains we have made thus far have come through identity politics.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“However, I hope to have made clear that white supremacy is something much more pervasive and subtle than the actions of explicit white nationalists. White supremacy describes the culture we live in, a culture that positions white people and all that is associated with them (whiteness) as ideal. White supremacy is more than the idea that whites are superior to people of color; it is the deeper premise that supports this idea—the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“White fragility functions as a form of bullying; I am going to make it so miserable for you to confront me—no matter how diplomatically you try to do so—that you will simply back off, give up, and never raise the issue again.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“The story of Jackie Robinson is a classic example of how whiteness obscures racism by rendering whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible. Robinson is often celebrated as the first African American to break the color line and play in major-league baseball. While Robinson was certainly an amazing baseball player, this story line depicts him as racially special, a black man who broke the color line himself. The subtext is that Robinson finally had what it took to play with whites, as if no black athlete before him was strong enough to compete at that level. Imagine if instead, the story went something like this: “Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.” This version makes a critical distinction because no matter how fantastic a player Robinson was, he simply could not play in the major leagues if whites—who controlled the institution—did not allow it. Were he to walk onto the field before being granted permission by white owners and policy makers, the police would have removed him.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“The incomes of the poorest 10 percent of people increased by less than three dollars a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent increased 182 times as much.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“There has been no actual loss of power for the white elite, who have always controlled our institutions and continue to do so by a very wide margin. Of the fifty richest people on earth, twenty-nine are American. Of these twenty-nine, all are white, and all but two are men (Lauren Jobs inherited her husband’s wealth, and Alice Walton her father’s).”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct. But it is a powerful construct because it calls out to a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Racism hurts (even kills) people of color 24-7. Interrupting it is more important than my feelings, ego, or self-image.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“But whiteness goes even one better: it is a category of identity that is most useful when its very existence is denied. That’s its twisted genius. Whiteness embodies Charles Baudelaire’s admonition that “the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“He keeps calling, but I'm out of reach. I'm a speckled seal swimming past the breakers, a seabird with a wingspan so strong I can fly for miles. I'm the new moon, hidden and safe from him, from everyone.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes while, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me