The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace Quotes

“If you want to, and you don’t, then that’s on you.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“Look, anything you do, if it isn’t hard, it isn’t doing anything for you. So you’re better off not doing it. Use your time somewhere else.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“Like a bird handled by humans whose flock would not accept it back, Rob now wore the unwashable scent of the Ivy League.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“Say a white boy takes a wrong turn and comes to my hood," he once said. "Now he's in the minority––nobody wants him there, unless it's to rob his ass––and more than anything he has to think about how to protect himself, how to get out. There's no weaker situation to be in than that, and this boy isn't getting anything productive done until he's out, back among his own people. But we take a wrong turn and end up at Yale, for the first time in our lives we don't have to worry about protecting ourselves. And we were all able to get enough shit done to be accepted here––so imagine what we can do when you take all the crazy hood shit out of the equation and we can just focus on the business at hand. So what if it's annoying as hell? Instead of sitting around here bitching about it, maybe we just accept that it is what it is, and know that we have the capacity to get way more from them than they'll ever get from us.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“He saw something more in those eyes. The emotion wasn't nakedly apparent, but Mr. Cawley was a professional at reading the subtleties of people. The elderly and wildly successful credit card magnate believed that certain human frailties could actually help fuel success. Insecurity drove billionaire entrepreneurs. Emotional instability made for superb art. The need for attention built great political leaders. But anger, in his experience, led only to inertia.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“Friendship, in this community, was simple: it meant being there. Friendship necessitated no pride, no projection of having your shit together if you didn’t, no passivity, no judgment—and especially no fronting, which had characterized so many relationships at Yale. Friendship here was the most dependable means by which they were going to get through their various lives.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“and it’s like nothing matters, not even time, and for a couple hours I can just be.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“Deeper in their hearts, they were debating what kind of man they wanted their son to be.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“People bring their own shit to the way they see things. If they don’t believe what you’re doing is right, that’s their choice. But the choice has more to do with them than with you. Don’t worry about it. You made your own choice.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“...he wondered how a person as bright and deserving as Rob Peace could have made the choices, beginning on the night of that banquet, that had resulted in this. And he figured that the choices hadn't necessarily begun on that night. Most likely, they'd begun on the night he was born, and not all of them had been his to make.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“As a kid who had geared much of his life around the concerns of others, he was neither accustomed to nor comfortable fielding inquiries about himself.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“The men her girlfriends dated were too often angry and muttering about oppression. One of the reasons she took to Skeet later in life was that he never went to that place; he believed with a firm positivity that he didn't need to waste time resenting real or imagined social constructs because he would always be ahead of them. The individual, not the people, was responsible for success or failure.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“Raquel’s mother had driven her fiercely to do well in school, such that high academic prowess had been the only option. Others had come upon money by luck, or had relatives acting as patrons. Rob had had none of those things. All he’d had was a home, and a harried home at that, paired with his own drive. What he’d achieved, he’d achieved almost exclusively on his own.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“Arthur saw a closed-mindedness that was, he felt, self-propagating and innately limiting. More broadly, he believed these qualities explained precisely how an intelligent guy like Rob would always make life harder on himself than it needed to be. Here he was, drinking brandy in a prestigious society in a top-ranked school, the beneficiary of so many gifts both natural and bestowed, surrounded by bright and open-minded classmates, and yet still he remained mired in, even paralyzed by, what was effectively his own racism.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“A poetry professor had once defined romance to me as "bringing two people together when every force in the universe is working to keep them apart.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“In the wake of his breakdown, Oswaldo had become hyperattuned to the way he, and people like him, were perceived. For his first three years at Yale, he'd been frustrated by these perceptions, feeling that they were inescapable, allowing that caged feeling to overwhelm him. The perspective granted him by two weeks of near total isolation had led him to believe that he––and in a much bigger way, Rob––had only propagated the ignorance of their peers. Because they did get stoned all the time, they did get angry, they did dress like thugs, they did talk shit about a college education that might set them up for fulfilling lives, they did set themselves apart. For Oswaldo, the issue had ceased to be a philosophical and historical one, and instead had come to revolve around a simple goal: to graduate from Yale without making that task harder than it needed to be. After all, that was the point of college––not freedom, not alcohol, not relationships, but to obtain a degree.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“Oswaldo was flummoxed by the fact that his friend could be so quiet, almost embarrassed, about his academic acumen, yet so damn loud and proud of his status as a premier campus drug dealer.

"I've never met anyone so smart but so fucking dumb," he told Rob.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“He was known to hit low, drive upward from the hips, and flip other boys over his shoulder and onto their backs, knocking the wind out of them on the glass-littered asphalt, sometimes causing a fumble and always inciting cheers from onlookers up and down the street––especially when he punctuated the hit with the words "Patent that!"...This permissible violence was unique in that it elicited respect from the victim rather than calls for retribution.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“homeowner, and come away with $20,000 or $30,000 cash in pocket. Success in real estate required skills that Rob believed were some of his strongest: the work ethic to locate those homes, the social skills to negotiate with people ranging from rich lenders to working-class contractors to poor renters, and the desire to make money in crafty but fundamentally honest ways. And, at least in Rob’s idealized vision, he would be making a positive mark in the world. Because a house meant shelter. It meant heat. It meant security. Above all, it meant family. Some friends who knew about Skeet’s passing felt that something equally powerful drove him: Rob had lost not only his father but also the goal of releasing his father in which he’d invested so much work since high school. He’d achieved almost every objective he’d ever laid out”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“Her son seemed to be belatedly rebelling against all his celebrated accomplishments- as well as the responsibilities inherent in them, the obligations to own his talents.In that rebellion, she saw a young man who was confused and upset that his life wasn't stacking up to be what he and everyone around him had always assumed it would.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“They can’t arrest their way out of the problem,” said one bystander at the Garden Spires. “There need to be alternatives to crime. The root cause of it all is poverty.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“told him I’d grown up “near Philly,” when in fact I had grown up in an eighteenth-century farmhouse on fifteen acres of rolling rural hills in Chester County, thirty miles from the city.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“The death of someone you know is so vastly different from reading of the same event happening to a stranger. You are familiar with your friend’s face and voice, and so you are haunted, during the overstimulated state of being wide awake at four in the morning, by the very specific expressions and sounds he might have made as a bullet, perhaps more than one, passed into his body.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“In his evolving view, the fact that he'd gone to those schools and accomplished those things didn't need to complicate what life had once been about: the simplicity of providing for oneself, without expectations.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“HennaMan,”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“Looking back now, it is easy to feel as if she alone knew that success and happiness in life were more elusive even than an Ivy League diploma.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“Mr. Cawley looked into Rob’s eyes and understood that the young man was saying this only because he was supposed to. He saw something more in those eyes: anger. The emotion wasn’t nakedly apparent, but Mr. Cawley was a professional at reading the subtleties of people. The elderly and wildly successful credit card magnate believed that certain human frailties could actually help fuel success. Insecurity drove billionaire entrepreneurs. Emotional instability made for superb art. The need for attention built great political leaders. But anger, in his experience, led only to inertia. He remembered when he’d offered to pay Rob’s tuition at this very event, in this very gymnasium—an offer he’d never made to any student before or since. As a financial master, Mr. Cawley looked at the world in terms of investments, of risk and reward. In 1998, the “investment” in Rob had struck him on paper as one of the lowest-risk and the highest-return; he saw no possible downside in giving this rare boy the slight push (Yale’s four-year tuition of $140,000 being slight for a bank CEO worth nine figures) he needed to reach the pinnacle for which he was already headed. Almost a decade later, as Rob broke off eye contact to gaze down at the floor as if there were a pit between them, Mr. Cawley understood that a life wasn’t lived on paper. He was not disappointed so much as confused, and he opted not to inquire further into what exactly had happened to Rob’s psyche between Yale graduation and now. He wanted to spare himself the sting of his own poor judgment. This conversation was the last he ever had with Rob.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“ON JULY 1, 2006, Cory Booker officially took office as the new mayor of Newark. He’d gained fame in the late ’90s as a city councilman who would sleep in a tent at city housing projects, hold hunger strikes and live on food stamps, patrol bad neighborhoods himself and physically confront the dealers holding down their corners. His victory was the first regime change in two decades, and it happened only after six years of near-bloody battling between the young, charismatic, light-skinned, Stanford-Yale-Oxford-educated upstart and the old, grizzled, but equally charismatic incumbent. The tension between Cory Booker and Sharpe James had been national news for most of the ’00s. The 2002 election, which Booker lost, was documented in the Oscar-nominated Streetfight, which between talking head interviews showed intense footage of the predominantly poor, black constituents who ardently supported James’s altercating with the working-class whites and Puerto Ricans who fought for Booker and his eloquent calls for public service and revitalization. The documentary was a near-perfect picture of a specific place and time: the declining city at risk of being left behind, the shoulder-height view of the vast number of problems in play, and the presentation of two equal and opposing paths forward whose backers were split almost definitively along socioeconomic lines. The 2002 election had been beyond combative; a riot nearly broke out when Booker showed up at a street basketball tournament that Sharpe James was already attending, and James called Booker “a Republican who took money from the KKK and the Taliban . . . who’s collaborating with the Jews to take over Newark.” When James—who was constantly being investigated for various alleged corruptions—won the election by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent, his victory seemed to cement Newark’s representation of “permanent poverty,” a culture of violence and corruption (at least if you subscribed to the New York Times).”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“Rob, by all accounts, had never thought much about race. While he had painstakingly devised methods to navigate the different groups of people in his life, almost all of those people had been black. Uncharacteristically for the average black student coming to Yale, he’d never contemplated, let alone practiced, the fine intricacies of living in a socioeconomic atmosphere not his own. New friendships with people who railed against those intricacies—loudly, profanely—had him thinking about race very much. Typical of Rob Peace, though not of Sherman and the others, he did so intellectually rather than angrily. “Say a white boy takes a wrong turn and comes to my hood,” he once said. “Now he’s in the minority—nobody wants him there, unless it’s to rob his ass—and more than anything he has to think about how to protect himself, how to get out. There’s no weaker situation to be in than that, and this boy isn’t getting anything productive done until he’s out, back among his own people. But we take a wrong turn and end up at Yale, for the first time in our lives we don’t have to worry about protecting ourselves. And we were all able to get enough shit done to be accepted here—so imagine what we can do when you take all the crazy hood shit out of the equation and we can just focus on the business at hand. So what if it’s annoying as hell? Instead of sitting around here bitching about it, maybe we just accept that it is what it is, and know that we have the capacity to get way more from them than they’ll ever get from us.”
― Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League