theory of life labyrinth of death

The books of quotations that rarely let you down are commonplace books, those intellectual scrapbooks made for personal use and compiled by a single avid reader. Packed with miscellaneous delights — phrases, jokes, anecdotes, lovely sentences — they read like secret autobiographies, back catalogs of joy and heartbreak. You can apply them like compresses on the ugly bruises of life.

Mrs. Bond said that while her organization’s work remains vital, she ponders whether it will always be necessary. ‘I always tell people, in the long run wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t need it?’ she said.

Writing is also a kind of reproduction of life, one marked by contradictory and overwhelming emotions. But the continuum of writing — even with the anguish that you might not always know how to revive it and that no life might ever pass through it again — can be severed, if you need to, out of necessity or other pressing needs. In the end, you have to separate yourself from your books. But you never really cut the umbilical cord. Children always remain an inescapable knot of love, of terrors, of satisfactions and anxieties.

Elzie is mocha-brown, straight, and a high priestess of clapback-tivism.

ignorance is bliss

Instead of crisis, a more accurate descriptor would be the thing in Flint when the government actively poisoned the residents for two years and the only reason the cycle is slowly being reversed now is because they got caught, but they probably never thought they'd get caught because so many of the residents are poor and black, but, news flash, it's not just black people getting sick; it's everyone in Flint, but unfortunately that's what happens when you exist near black people.

some multiracial women expect white men they date to have a certain racial literacy – the racial socialization and antiracist training that defends against and counters racism

That someone gets a lot out of writing something does not necessarily mean anyone else will get a similar amount from reading that thing. If only literature worked that way.

You can’t paint yourself into a corner and then say, ‘Whose brush is this?’