I Then Ask, What Would It Be Like If You Could Simply Give Us [white People] Feedback, Have Us Graciously

“I then ask, ‘What would it be like if you could simply give us [white people] feedback, have us graciously receive it, reflect, and work to change the behavior?’ Recently a man of color sighed and said ‘It would be revolutionary.’”

-White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo

“Whites hold the social and institutional positions in society to infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not. A person of color may refuse to wait on me if I enter a shop, but people of color cannot pass legislation that prohibits me and everyone like me from buying a home in a certain neighborhood.”

-White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

“It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune. In our family, that was Tyler. He was waltzing while the rest of us hopped a jig; he was deaf to the raucous music of our lives, and we were deaf to the serene polyphony of his.”

- Educated by Tara Westover

“She read about New Women. She hadn’t ever realized that she’d been an Old Woman, but after some thought she decided that titles like that were all one with the romance and the knitting and the orgasms, and the really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.”

-Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

“The past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”

-Virginia Woolf

Ce que je pense (et c’est cela que je voulais dire) c’est que je devrais pousser un grand et beau cri, un long et joyeux cri qui résonnerait dans toute la vallée, que c’est ce bonheur-là que je devrais m’offrir, hurler une bonne fois, mais je ne le fais pas, je ne l’ai pas fait. Je me remets en route avec seul le bruit de mes pas sur le gravier.

Ce sont des oublis comme celui-là que je regretterai.

— Jean-Luc Lagarce, Juste la fin du monde