Rachel

“And what about a person's life? How do you make a map of that? The borders people draw between themselves. The scars left along the ground of one's heart.”
― Charmaine Wilkerson, Black Cake

“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“Becoming a parent? Someone said it’s an invisible tidal wave that hits you with such force that you lose your breath and never quite get it back. You spend your whole life gasping, someone else said, because it’s a love so immense that it squeezes the air out of your lungs. Everyone else thinks you look like the same person afterward, a third said, but you don’t understand any of it, because there’s such a clear before and after. A completely new you.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“The covering up of Till’s murder was not something that was perpetrated by a few bad apples. It couldn’t have been. The erasure was a collective effort, one that continues to this day. This isn’t comfortable history to face. The more I looked at the story of the barn and came to understand the forces that moved everyone involved into the Mississippi Delta in 1955, the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view, never learning the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it’s pushed underground. There lies the true horror of Emmett Till’s murder and the undeserved gift of his martyrdom. Empathy only lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, and once you know his story, you can’t unknow it. Once you connect all the dots, there’s almost nowhere they don’t lead. Which is why so many have fought literally and figuratively for so long to keep the reality from view.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi