Quinn > Recent Status Updates

“When I made it back from Afghanistan, I knew that I’d live. Here it was the opposite: it’d kill you only after you got home.”

“We came home. I took off all the clothes that I’d worn there and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my cap to my little son. He really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years later they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his brain. I don’t want to talk anymore”

“Not a day went by there when I didn’t think of death. I always left the house wearing clean clothes, a freshly laundered blouse, skirt, underthings. Just in case I got killed.”

“The woman who’s giving birth yells with relief, happily and then any starts crying - it’s just come out… and these robbers say to us: what is it, a Kulyab or a Pamir? We don’t say anything. They start yelling. “What is it?” We don’t say anything. So they grab the little baby, it’s been on this earth for maybe five, ten minutes, and they throw it out the window.”

“Pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs.”

Today 1 out of every 5 Belarusians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for depopulation, radiation is number 1. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%.

“It wasn’t until 1967 that the United States Supreme Court finally struck down anti-miscegenation statutes in Loving v. Virginia, but restrictions on interracial marriage persisted even after that landmark ruling. Alabama state constitution still prohibited the practice in 1986, “the legislature shall never pass any law to authorize/legalize marriage between a white person & a Negro/descendant of a Negro.”

It was this sense of mischief and audacity that made her company feel so freeing and magical; it made her accessible, not like one of those grown-ups who constantly reminded you of your immaturity.

“They may not like me, but they respect me. Respect is better than like.” I disagreed. I didn’t care about being respected—that was a schoolteacher thing, like black lace-up shoes—but I very much wanted to be liked. My mother frequently said I’d have to give up that frivolous desire if I was going to amount to anything. She said that wanting to be liked was a weakness of character."

“You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

“Where did you learn to do that?” Esi had asked Maame then, and the woman replied “you can learn anything when you have to learn it. You could learn to fly if it meant you would live another day.”

300,000 in early 1970d to 2.3 million people today… one in every 15 people in the US in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison.

“The span of time between the placing of an order and the arrival of appetizers is one of the most perilous in a human interaction.”