Ally > Recent Status Updates

"...what shocks the most isn't the cruelty or indifference. Many people's governments are cruel, many people's governments are indifferent. It's this relentless parachuting of virtue... And it's the way every ideal turns vaporous the moment it threatens to move beyond the confines of the speeches and statements, the moment it threatens even the most frivolous parcel of self-interest."

"When the Koreans had to choose a Japanese surname, Isak's father had chosen Bando because it had sounded like the Korean word ban-deh, meaning objection, making their compulsory Japanese name a kind of joke."

Gotta love the covert resistance <3

"Contrary to Kearney's and Tillman's logic, racial conflict did not emerge spontaneously, but rather was consciously planned by the representatives of the economically ascendant class. They needed to impede working-class unity so as to facilitate their own exploitative designs. The forthcoming 'race riots' ... were orchestrated ... to heighten the tensions and antagonism within the multiracial working class."

"As W. E. B. DuBois observed, the profit potential of the convict lease system persuaded
many Southern planters to rely exclusively on convict labor ... 'Since 1876,' DuBois
points out, 'Negroes have been arrested on the slightest provocation and given long
sentences or fines which they were compelled to work out.'"

Slavery by another name.

I'm really enjoying this one!

Good lord this book makes scrabble suspenseful

"I remember, too, how among the unfamiliar temples, gods, spirits, and rituals, I feel disconnected from myself as spiritual content, as sin and soul. I can be material, elegantly formed bones.... I exist as the parts and the whole of the beautifully wrapped food in the bento boxes. I don't need to hate all this religion. I reclaim the act of blessing without thinking about it, without knowing it."

"I wasn't made for this. I am a lexicographer. I have a modern languages degree. The whole point of a modern languages degree is you don't end up soiling yourself in an old banger on a river bank in Paraguay."

"The problem with approaching history in America is that too many people measure things by distance and not by impact."

I think the hardest thing to buy into about the Harry Potter series is that all the women swoon over Lockhart.

I can suspend my disbelief for dragons and shit, but the swooning would just not happen. We're too smart for that.

“Are you a writer?”

“No,” I said. The table came back into focus. He was looking at me. “I like books. And everything else.”

“You like everything else?”

“You know what I mean, I like it all. I like being moved.”

"Mainstream communication does not want women, particularly white women, responding to racism. It wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of your existence, like evening-time or the common cold."

"Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied. There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free."

"These men were experiencing even minor female representation as an iniquity. As far as they were concerned, the playing field was already level, and the entirely male line-up was just an objective reflection of merit."

Ah yes, the good 'ol "objective reflection of merit" excuse. That's... believable 😑

"... because what is male is universal (and what is female is niche) ... V. S. Naipaul criticises Jane Austen’s writing as ‘narrow’, while at the same time no one is expecting The Wolf of Wall Street to address the Gulf War, or Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard to write about anyone but himself ... to receive praise from the New Yorker for voicing ‘universal anxieties’ in his six-volume autobiography."

Poor kids get snatched by the real world
at seven, eight, nine years old, dragged
onto the front porch of adulthood, forced
to figure it out on their own
rarely making old bones,
a few will live to see their grandchildren chewed up by the same machinery
then buried in cardboard boxes
I wanted a coffin made of wood
from trees not yet planted
my appetite for time was growing.

Switching from the audiobook to the book was a good call. With its unique style, this is a book that reads very differently on paper!

The stream of consciousness style and the paragraphs as long as the line at the DMV make this a *somewhat* tough read.

BUT--its being so insightful in its treatment of how a young woman interacts with her assimilitave political and cultural environments make it worth savoring anyway. Is it too soon for me to say that this is going to be one of my favorite books this year? ❤

This is such a stirring read. I want to review it when I'm finished, but I don't know if I'll have the words to do it justice.

“My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn't trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system, and even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us were perpetually less, we distrusted each other."

While the book itself is somehow compulsively readable, the protagonist doesn't seem to have a thought in his head...

"We were young people living in houses seemingly more populated by ghosts than by the living, with the old dead and the new."

I've never met a teenager who talked like the ones in this book, but I guess that's not to say they don't exist? Is this a thing in all of John Green's novels? I confess I am not well-versed.

I just deleted all of the nonsensical reviews I wrote when I was 15, and now I can rest at ease XD

This is... cornier than I expected?