Holly Blevins

“But we look away at our own peril. For what wonders await us when we don't turn away. Sometimes it is easier to try to make sense of the world one story at a time.
And when we dare to listen, we remember that there is no "other," there is only us, and what we have in common will always be greater than what separates us.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“Fear. I was familiar with fear, yet each time I felt it, it was never the same as the other times, as though it came in different flavors and colors.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“And by then, I well knew what would be done upon that land, how the sin of theft would be multiplied by the sin of bondage.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer