‘Everyone’s talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don’t think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect our imaginations. Stories and poetry do that. You need a language in this world. People want words, they want to hear their situation in language, and find a way to talk about it. It allows you to find a language to talk about your own pain.

If you give kids a language, they can use it. I think that’s what these educators fear. If you really educate these kids, they aren’t going to punch you in the face, they are going to challenge you with your own language.’

                                              --Jeanette Winterson

For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black.'
                              ― Christopher Hitchens 

'As immigrant artists for whom so much has been sacrificed, so many dreams have been deferred, we already doubt so much. Who do we think we are? We think we are people who risked not existing at all. People who might have had a mother and father killed, either by a government or nature, even before we were born. Some of us think we are accidents of literacy. I do.'
                                       ―Edwidge Danticat 

‘I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.’
                          —Norman Mailer

The reason I obsess over the New York Public Library's paltry hours, like late morning starts, slim evening hours, and no Sunday hours, is that it shows a lack of determination on everyone's part. Something's not being done to get the library's hours up to where they should be. Even if money's the reason. And, of course, that will be the reason given. Same thing about kids and reading in the city's schools. Something's not being done.
 

'This is the world as it is. This is where you start.' 
― Saul D. Alinsky

It was raining a little outside my window early this morning like the phone showed it would be. But I went downtown with my sign anyway because maybe it would stop even though the phone had blue rain coming out of little clouds all morning. There was an older Asian woman selling umbrellas out of a cart just outside where I came up from the subway. She can't speak English, but her grandchild may go to Penn or Dartmouth. I wasn't outside for five minutes, I hadn't even taken my sign out of the big plastic bag, when I gave in and headed back downstairs to the subway and home. The Asian woman held an umbrella over her head as she stood next to her cart.