When one tells a story, one has to choose where to stop. So, for every story, there’s an infinite number of endings, a library’s worth of endings, every book a new chance. Perhaps, for us, for all of us, there are so many endings that they can’t all be heartbreaking and baffling. There must be a place to stop that is just a step into a new possibility.

— R. Eric Thomas

R. Eric Thomas Quotes

When I first learned about the Dewey decimal system, I assumed it was an impartial way of defining and filing the breadth of knowable information. I came to understand that the intention of the filer and the perspective that they carry play a huge role in how Dewey, and any other system, is employed.

— R. Eric Thomas

The feeling of being alone, I’ve found, is the poison that has no taste. It seeps in slowly and easily; it never seems unusual. Isolation presents as an undesired state but nothing serious, nothing permanent, until the lonely nights become lonely months.

— R. Eric Thomas

Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?

— R. Eric Thomas

For years, I thought that the way to keep myself from getting burned was to set myself on fire first or to snuff out my light.

— R. Eric Thomas

I think my goal was for people to read it and say, “You are very funny, and racism is bad.

— R. Eric Thomas

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

— R. Eric Thomas

The thing is, the promise of church is community, salvation, and a relationship with God. If the gay music minister and the person with AIDS cannot be part of the church, where do they find God?

— R. Eric Thomas

I laugh and remember that I’ll be dead before dystopia really starts to take hold.

— R. Eric Thomas

The library is the place where I could borrow first Grover’s philosophical tome, then a couple of Choose Your Own Adventures I could cheat at, and later a stack of mysteries I could spoil for myself, all attempts to look for some other way of understanding who I was.

— R. Eric Thomas

Maybe it’s like one of those “heartwarming” race movies where a white person with suspect ideas and a black person become friends and they both learn a lesson about difference except nothing that’s learned is new to the black person, who was just going about their black business when this whole thing started. If you see it that way, please feel free to option this story for an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie.

— R. Eric Thomas

Ireally loved her. Isn’t that something? Before I knew myself, before I knew that sexuality was a spectrum, before the difficulties of college and becoming and stepping out into the world, I fell in love with a young woman in high school. We had a friendship that bloomed into a prom date like the culmination of a teen romcom. It’s a simple story. And one that could end right there. Except it doesn’t. Or rather it won’t.

— R. Eric Thomas

We are not going to band together and listen to a bunch of scientists to save humanity like Jake Gyllenhaal in a disaster movie. Sorry. You know how I know? Because a bunch of scientists are telling us how to save the world right now, and half the world isn’t listening to them.

— R. Eric Thomas

There are probably few more interesting date options than lazily wandering the aisles of a library or a bookstore. Better if you’re getting paid for it. Not that we were on dates or that we were dating. That would be untrue. But if you were inclined to get to know someone, to show them a piece of yourself, to perhaps fall a little bit in love, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better way than by spending hours picking up books, flipping them open, and talking about what you find inside.

— R. Eric Thomas

For all of love’s complications, I think every couple’s story starts with two strangers who, if they want to survive, must move heaven and hell to reach each other.

— R. Eric Thomas

Every family’s story is a tale of becoming, sometimes through oppression, sometimes through achievement, and sometimes simply through the current of time. We were born grasping after freedom, in a house that could not hold us; every day we get closer and closer to our destination, until our features come into view. Soon, everyone further on down the family line can see us from their seats at the table; we’re coming home.

— R. Eric Thomas

I’m sure I’ll be an anxious old man, and I’ll probably end up lying in my grave going, “Ugh, I feel like there’s something I should be doing right now. I wonder if everyone is angry at me. Oh my God, how long is this going to take? And what happens next?

— R. Eric Thomas

We had the easiness that comes from knowing the same stories and knowing which parts you’re supposed to say at what time. I often wonder who the audience is for those stories, the ones everyone gathered has heard every year, the ones most of us lived through. Maybe they’re not for anyone outside of the circle. Maybe the telling is the metronome by which we set the beating of our hearts.

— R. Eric Thomas

Who am I doing this for and do they want what I want?

— R. Eric Thomas

But they were relentless because they were trying to create the world that they wanted their children to live in.

— R. Eric Thomas

If this was a parable, I guess the lesson would be that life isn’t fair but if you complain sometimes you get free things.

— R. Eric Thomas
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