Guide Me Home Quotes

“Wondered which wounded the soul more, living in a country that had never kept any of its promises or seeing America’s capacity for good catch wind and fly for a while, only to come crashing back down.”
― Attica Locke, Guide Me Home

“She didn’t want charity, she said, and Darren felt a thick sorrow for all the ways she too was gripped by the idea that there was something noble in not needing help in this world, that self-reliance was an American virtue to be treasured. When we all needed each other more than ever, Darren thought, would only make it through whatever was coming next if we knew enough to lean on each other, lend loving hands.”
― Attica Locke, Guide Me Home

“Sometimes you gotta be careful with white folks who ain’t got much of nothing. Either they get it, how it’s about eight different ways we’re both getting screwed in this country, or they’re sure you’re the reason they ain’t got shit, or as much shit as they think they should have, and they hate you for it.”
― Attica Locke, Guide Me Home

“And you know who else isn’t tired? The fucking Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, the Patriot Front, and the Proud Boys, the needle-dicked fools who worship him, who think he’s going to change white folks’ fortunes, when a Mexican or black person has never been the reason they can’t afford health care, that they can’t get a decent job, that this country has no fucking safety net for anybody, black, white, brown, or purple.” Darren reminded Greg that he hated that purple shit, white people’s hyperbole run amok.”
― Attica Locke, Guide Me Home

“You know who isn’t tired?” his friend said. “Donald Trump. That motherfucker pops up every morning looking for something else he can fuck up, some other angle on this presidency thing, who he hasn’t grifted yet.”
― Attica Locke, Guide Me Home

“The race problem lay at white folks’ feet; it lay in their willingness to talk to their cousins, their friends and coworkers, to call out their bosses, even people on the street, when they did or said something racist.”
― Attica Locke, Guide Me Home

“But white people interested in justice in this country were sitting on a kind of superpower — if they would learn how to wear the cape, if they would learn how to fly high over the swampy morass of their own self-pity and shame.”
― Attica Locke, Guide Me Home

“The firm did its fair share of “public policy law,” which was another way of saying they were government lobbyists.”
― Attica Locke, Guide Me Home

“He’d devoted his entire career to ridding the state of Texas and the country of racists like the Brotherhood, had compromised his honor to do so, and now they were in every branch of government, sitting pretty.”
― Attica Locke, Guide Me Home

“Turned out the Founding Fathers were just men who liked to talk big all night after tying on a few, scribbling down laws and ideals that contradicted themselves every third paragraph, dreaming up an institution of freedom on a foundation built by slaves. It was all a house of cards. Smoke and mirrors. Just marks on parchment. With holes you could drive a truck through. And a talented huckster got behind the wheel of one and drove it all the way to the White House. It was reported that he had told over ten thousand lies since taking the oath of office, had broken umpteen laws. Darren would have said allegedly, but the president had either committed or admitted to many of these on live television. And no one seemed to care. Not really.”
― Attica Locke, Guide Me Home

“The fever dream that had been the years since Donald Trump was elected. Years that had laid bare the fragility of democracy.”
― Attica Locke, Guide Me Home

“Sure, hope was too often offered instead of real change, a cheap placeholder for a better day. But it also kept people alive. You couldn’t grow a tomato, a sweet pepper, or a peach without hope. You had to believe the land you were on could bear fruit to bother trying. You had to have vision to eat.”
― Attica Locke, Guide Me Home