Most of us think the word racism is synonymous with the word prejudice. But racism is more than just discrimination based on skin color. It’s also about who has institutional power. Just as racism creates disadvantages for people of color that make success harder to achieve, it also gives advantages to white people that make success easier to achieve. It’s hard to see those advantages, much less own up to them. And that, I realized, was why I had to write this book.
And then he remembered that in the outside world, no one had to unlock a door before he entered.
Could love be not grand gestures or empty vows, not promises meant to be broken, but instead a paper trail of forgiveness?
It is remarkable how events and truths can be reshaped, like wax that’s sat too long in the sun. There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.
I like the word ‘evil’. Scramble it a little and you will get ‘vile’ and ‘live’. ‘Good’, on the other hand, is just a command to ‘go do’.
I felt this boy whose name I couldn’t be bothered to remember grunting and heaving inside me; I was that empty and that far away. And suddenly I knew what became of all those lost balloons: they were the loves that slipped out of our fists; the blank eyes that rose in every night sky.
There is something else about memory, something Thomas hadn’t brought up. It’s not a video recording. It’s subjective. It’s a culturally relevant account of what happened. It doesn’t matter if it’s accurate; it matters if it’s important in some way to you. If it teaches you something you need to learn.
Paranormal experiences are just energy manifesting itself in some way: a flashlight flickering on when you haven’t pressed the button; a vision during an electrical storm; your cell phone ringing, and no one on the other end of the line. A surge of energy pulsed through networks to give me a message – I just can’t tell who’s sent it.
The people we define as crazy just might be more sane than you and me.
Firefighting is a world of Murphy’s Law; it is when you can least afford a crisis that one crops up.
Brit had wanted it to say LOVED. Those were the directions she gave me for the granite carver. But at the last minute I changed it. I was never going to stop, so why make it past tense? I.
The same things that trip you up as a human will tie you in knots as a spirit, if you don’t let go and let God. Speaking of God, He’s real and He’s there, too. And don’t ask what He looks like because you wouldn’t understand even if I told you. There’s just some things none of us are supposed to know, until it’s our time.
Once you are close enough to see it coming, there’s nothing to do but weather the storm.
One day, you realize there is less of your life left than what you’ve already lived. And you think, How did this happen so fast? It was only yesterday when I was having my first legal drink, when I was diapering him, when I was young.
This virtual stranger knew me better than anyone else in Africa. He knew me better than I knew myself. What I was really researching was not how elephants deal with loss but how humans can’t.
On the other side of the curtain, two separate wars were being fought. One was to save the life of a women who’d been beaten to near death by her husband. The other was to allow her child to have any kind of a life at all.
I was in the mood to make out in the back row of the movie theater with someone who did not know my first name. I wanted three guys to fight for the honor of buying me a drink.
If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense.
His hand fell like a prayer on her temple.
What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise? – William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.