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Butler told budding writers to “forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”

[Octavia's] further research into slavery only cemented her conviction that systemic oppression based on hierarchal thinking was intricately woven into the fabric of not only American society but human civilization.

I can’t make a culture sane. United Americana inherited a single, insane lie. Freedom built on bondage. A structure demanding servitude and celebrating its absence.

She had that specific kind of rootlessness that comes when you’re orphaned by two living parents.

The grander the hobgoblin, the smaller the souls."

- "The Occurrences" by John Brandon

"If we do not use reason when deciding what our machines will do for us, and where they ought to take us, they may tip us into the bottomless."

(This was written in 1935)

A black utopian perspective places the seemingly provisional, expedient, and rudimentary at the center of any vision to create a better world. It is an outlook that clings to what tends to be discarded. It assumes the “darky town” that survived for generations with limited resources, which was created to provide for people who weren’t allowed to thrive elsewhere, presents some kind of blueprint for a desirable future

How is a Gucci logo bag beautiful? It really isn’t. It’s only Gucci. Why is a Louis Vuitton logo bag beautiful and desirable? It is repetitive and unremarkable; it signals wealth, not beauty. Its stamp signals class, acquisition, desire, extraction and a sameness. A paper bag is more beautiful.

Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20% of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then, in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency, Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he’d thought, perhaps half the country. Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear.

W E C A R R Y

We carry
the infinite
natural
tiredness
of the hidden
struggle
of these
beginnings
that each year
unbind
the land

F R I C T I O N

With my wolf hunger
I haul down
my lamb body

I am both
the wretched boat
and the lecherous ocean