The Office of Historical Corrections Quotes

“All of her adult life people have asked Rena why she goes to such dangerous places, and she has always wanted to ask them where the safe place is. The danger is in chemicals and airports and refugee camps and war zones and regions known for sex tourism. The danger also sometimes took their trash out for them. The danger came over for movie night and bought them a popcorn maker for Christmas. The danger hugged her mother and shook her father’s hand.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“Besides the tablecloths, the decor is all old photographs and postcards that they scrounged up from wherever, because you know how white people love their history right up until it's true.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“Midwest nice was a steady, polite gaslighting I found sinister, a forced humility that prevented anyone from speaking up when they’d been diminished or disrespected, lest they be labeled an outsider. I was bewildered by the pride the region took in these pathologies.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“I needed no convincing of the fatal possibilities of government overreach, of the way the fatalities told the story of who the nation considered expendable, but, even after the low points of the previous decade, I believed in government, or at least believed in it more than the alternative. That my country might always expect me to audition for my life I accepted as fact, but I trusted the public charter of national government more than I trusted average white citizens acting unchecked.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“Boy-next-door, Rena knew, always meant white boy next door. When America has one natural blonde family left, its members will be trotted out to play every role that calls for someone all-American, to be interviewed in every time of crisis. They will be exhausted.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“I used to think you were so brave, and sometimes I still do, and sometimes I think it’s just that there’s nothing in your life but you, and you have no idea what it means to be scared that what you do might matter.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“She thought the insistence on victims without wrongdoers was at the base of the whole American problem, the lie that supported all the others.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“Forty days and forty nights of being locked up helpless, knowing everything you’d ever known was drowning all around you, and at the end God shows up with a whimsical promise that he will not destroy the world again with water, which seems like a hell of a caveat.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, is unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes one for the other. —James Baldwin”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“But what did it matter what she deserved, faced with the hilarity of one more person telling her glibly that better was out there when she was begging for mediocrity and couldn’t have that?”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“I distrusted, in general, appeals to nostalgia--I loved the past of archives, but there was no era of the past I had any inclination to visit with my actual human body, being rather fond of it having at least minimal rights and protections.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“Things were always salvageable between us, and knowing that felt like both a relief and an obligation.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man would adjust, or otherwise be deemed a lunatic or heretic. The one-eyed man would spend his life learning to translate what experience was his alone, or else he would learn to shut up about it.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“I'd had to learn again how to watch a man move through the world and calibrate his every step to be disarming, how to watch a man worry about his body and the conditions under which someone might take his any gesture the wrong way. I'd had to remember back to high school, when my heart belonged only to boys of my color, to whom I had to insist that no one else's disrespect of me was worth a fight, was worth what a fight would cost them.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“Lyssa thought she would talk to her mother about it, and then she remembered. She had to keep remembering, even after she'd seen the body and signed the paperwork and arranged a funeral. Somehow she'd expected the dying to be the worst part, that after it was over she could go home and tell some healthy living version of her mother about the terrible thing that had just happened to her.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“but I understand more now about how it feels to love the excess in people, about how knowing someone else’s love will consume you doesn’t make it any less real or any less reciprocated, about how you can leave a person behind just to save the thing they value most—yourself. Or maybe I understood it even then but couldn’t have told you how.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“A white man walks into a room. While everyone waited for the punch line, I excused myself and headed to the porch. That’s it, I called behind me. That’s the whole joke. Everything else disappears.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“At that, the crowd joined in--this was one of the Free Americans' rallying cries--We are the future--a cheerful way of saying the shame of the U.S. past wasn't genocide or terror but the fact that it hadn't completely worked out yet. It was nothing I hadn't heard before, but it was rattling. It was the ubiquity or it was the persistence. It was the way the Free Americans and their claims on being the only way Americans transcended facts and time and progress, the way they always seemed to be around the corner, the way, however lacking in general insight they might be, they could somehow hear the ticking clock of the question, the Do they know I'm human yet? the way they took delight in saying no, the way they took for granted that it would always be their question to answer.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“The problem is everyone, even Black people, believes that Black poverty is the worst poverty in the world, and Black urban poverty, forget it, and all urban Blackness always scans as poverty, which means people only love us as fetish. No one is sentimental about poor Black people unless they're wise and country and you could put a photograph of them on a porch with a quilt behind them in a museum.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“He kissed her forehead and said, “My little lady of ruthless ambition.” In the months after that, hw would sometimes ask her “How’s conquering the world going, my sweet ruthless girl?” in the delighted dumbed-down tone you would use to tell a house pet it was ferocious. She would nuzzle him, beginning to understand that just because he didn’t see something in her didn’t mean it wasn’t there, knowing there was still some freedom in the way he did no fathom yet how real and how necessary her ruthlessness would be.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“Besides the tablecloths, the decor is all old photographs and postcards that they scrounged up from wherever, because you know how white people love their history right up until it’s true.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“Not bad people,” said Genevieve after he’d left. “What would a white person actually have to do to lose the benefit of the doubt? How many murders would they have to cover up?”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“was the winter after the most depressing election of my adult life, a low point for my faith in the polis, and I had started keeping an unofficial tally in my head of how much I trusted each new white person I met.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“the insistence on victims without wrongdoers was at the base of the whole American problem, the lie that supported all the others.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“On the table there was a tin of butter cookies, open to show it still had cookies in it and had not yet been turned into a sewing kit.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“I loved the past of archives, but there was no era of the past I had any inclination to visit with my actual human body, being rather fond of it having at least minimal rights and protections.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“It felt unfair, how absurd someone could be and still be terrifying.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“I had abandoned the actual religion I was raised with as soon as I got to college, but when in moments of despair I needed the inspiration of a triumphant martyr figure who made me believe in impossible things, I thought not of saints or saviors but of my mother.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories

“I was jealous, of course, partly that by avoiding the academic race beat, Genie had sidestepped the daily trauma of the historical record, the sometimes brutality and sometimes banality of anti-Blackness, the loop of history that was always a noose if you looked at it long enough.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“A display cake read JUNETEENTH! in red frosting, surrounded by red, white, and blue stars and fireworks. A flyer taped to the counter above it encouraged patrons to consider ordering a Juneteenth cake early: We all know about the Fourth of July! the flyer said. But why not start celebrating freedom a few weeks early and observe the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation! Say it with cake! One of the two young women behind the bakery counter was Black, but I could guess the bakery's owner wasn't. The neighborhood, the prices, the twee acoustic music drifting out of sleek speakers: I knew all of the song's words, but everything about the space said who it was for. My memories of celebrating Juneteenth in DC were my parents taking me to someone's backyard BBQ, eating banana pudding and peach cobbler and strawberry cake made with Jell-O mix; at not one of them had I seen a seventy-five-dollar bakery cake that could be carved into the shape of a designer handbag for an additional fee. The flyer's sales pitch--so much hanging on that We all know--was targeted not to the people who'd celebrated Juneteenth all along but to office managers who'd feel hectored into not missing a Black holiday or who just wanted an excuse for miscellaneous dessert.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections