lily brannen’s Reviews > Between the World and Me > Status Update

“And think of how Prince’s daughter was now drafted into those solemn ranks and deprived of her birthright—that vessel which was her father, which brimmed with twenty-five years of love and was the investment of her grandparents and was to be her legacy.”

“But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history.”

“I grew up in a house drawn between love and fear. There was no room for softness. But this girl with the long dreads revealed something else—that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.”

“Hate gives identity … We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe … they were family to someone whom I loved. Their ordinary moments—answering the door, cooking in the kitchen, dancing to Adnina Howard—assaulted me and expanded my notion of the human spectrum … She taught me to love in new ways.”

“I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through the manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom.”