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“was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“He was all of them in one black body that night in the ring, and all of them when the shite men took him out back to those two iron rings.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“I avoided you, so that you couldn’t avoid me.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“Perhaps it would be a good idea if everyone just stopped writing for a couple of years and allowed readers to catch up.”
― John Boyne, A Ladder to the Sky

“The more you read, the more you write, the more the ideas will appear. They’ll fall like confetti around your head and your only difficulty will be deciding which ones to catch and which to let fall to the floor.”
― John Boyne, A Ladder to the Sky

“He touched me first, said he wanted to kiss me, told me he loved me. Every first step was taken by him. I don’t feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn’t the same as being in charge. But maybe he has to believe that. Maybe there’s a whole list of things he has to believe.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Kneeling before me, he lays his head on my lap and says, ‘I’m going to ruin you.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they’re nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“He wants to make sure he’ll always be there, no matter what. He wants to leave his fingerprints all over me, every piece of muscle and bone.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Hide all you want, but the truth will always find you.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“I need it to be a love story. I need it to be that.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“He's always going to be old. He has to be. That's the only way I can stay young and dripping with beauty.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Innerlich rase ich, bin Tragödie und Comic in einem, Hulk und Hybris, unter diesem friesischen Meereshimmel.”
― Thomas Melle, Die Welt im Rücken

“It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle â€� may they never give me peace.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase - still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other; that much I've learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.”
― Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History

“Over the last several decades, extreme poverty, victims of war, child mortality, crime, famine, child labour, deaths in natural disasters and the number of plane crashes have all plummeted. We’re living in the richest, safest, healthiest era ever. So why don’t we realise this? It’s simple. Because the news is about the exceptional, and the more exceptional an event is â€� be it a terrorist attack, violent uprising, or natural disaster â€� the bigger its newsworthiness.”
― Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History

“This is a book about a radical idea. An idea that’s long been known to make rulers nervous. An idea denied by religions and ideologies, ignored by the news media and erased from the annals of world history. At the same time, it’s an idea that’s legitimised by virtually every branch of science. One that’s corroborated by evolution and confirmed by everyday life.”
― Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History

“The great milestones of civilization always have the whiff of utopia about them at first. According to renowned sociologist Albert Hirschman, utopias are initially attacked on three grounds: futility (it’s not possible), danger (the risks are too great), and perversity (it will degenerate into dystopia). But Hirschman also wrote that almost as soon as a utopia becomes a reality, it often comes to be seen as utterly commonplace. Not so very long ago, democracy still seemed a glorious utopia. Many a great mind, from the philosopher Plato (427â€�347 B.C.) to the statesman Edmund Burke (1729â€�97), warned that democracy was futile (the masses were too foolish to handle it), dangerous (majority rule would be akin to playing with fire), and perverse (the “general interestâ€� would soon be corrupted by the interests of some crafty general or other). Compare this with the arguments against basic income. It’s supposedly futile because we can’t pay for it, dangerous because people would quit working, and perverse because ultimately a minority would end up having to toil harder to support the majority.”
― Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. Arthur C. Clarke (1917â€�2008)”
― Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

“In the twenty-first century, the real elite are those born not in the right family or the right class but in the right country.”
― Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

“But the real crisis of our times, of my generation, is not that we don’t have it good, or even that we might be worse off later on. No, the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better.”
― Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

“Instead, we should be posing a different question altogether: Which knowledge and skills do we want our children to have in 2030? Then, instead of anticipating and adapting, we’d be focusing on steering and creating. Instead of wondering what we need to do to make a living in this or that bullshit job, we could ponder how we want to make a living. This is a question no trend watcher can answer. How could they? They only follow the trends, they don’t make them. That part is up to us.”
― Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

“The correlation between ethnic background and crime, it turns out, is precisely zero. None, nothing, nada. Youth crime, the report stated, has its origins in the neighborhood where kids grow up. In poor communities, kids from Dutch backgrounds are every bit as likely to engage in criminal activity as those from ethnic minorities.”
― Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World