Speech Team Quotes

“That’s what a relationship is, right? Two people helping each other make a better version of themselves. Or I guess that’s what it should be.”
― Tim Murphy, Speech Team

“You might be left to distract or soothe yourself with the outlier possibility that the other person had been kidnapped or struck by a car or lightning, or had perhaps inadvertently fallen into a giant hole in the ground on their way to you. But mostly you would just be thrown back on yourself, left with the extra-ness of your own anticipation, time, and energy that suddenly had no container. The moment felt existential, as though all your life you’d been showing up to find people who weren’t there and had never had any intention of being there.”
― Tim Murphy, Speech Team

“It had never occurred to me that she was perhaps trying to hold on to her Blackness in a world where we denied her that merely because she defied our stereotypes of what a Black person should be, that perhaps she was dreaming of a future where she and other brainy Black people could discuss Black literature together free from the puzzled gaze of white people whose picture they didn’t fit into.”
― Tim Murphy, Speech Team

“No crush will imprint itself on your hippocampus like your high-school crush, such that even seeing their name in print years later will make you catch your breath and recall a kind of beauty that has gone unrivaled by all the succeeding beauties.”
― Tim Murphy, Speech Team