“Summers with Rene began with a cigarette in one side of her mouth and a squinting of her eyes as she thought . . . . Shortly, she would make her pronouncement and it would seem magical no matter how often the words were said. "It's a beach day," blessed the day. The rest was understood. No more needed to be said. I knew that she knew. She had the gift to read what would come from the skies as surely as my mother could see births and betrayals in the cards.”
― American Girl: Memories That Made Me
― American Girl: Memories That Made Me
“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live”
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“The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.”
― I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
― I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them--words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were In your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― The Body
― The Body
Daniel’s 2025 Year in Books
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