“Langston Hughes’ words sent chills down my spine. It gave me the wherewithal to truly understand that fascism is not at all a foreign term, nor is it strictly related to Europe or even novel in twenty-first century American life.”
“Taken together, these examples challenge the idea that the past disappears once it is no longer actively remembered. The past often remains present in quieter and less obvious ways. It stays in what is unsaid, in the places people move through, and in the physical traces of those who came before them.”
“You cannot command the oceans, nor can you dictate the trajectory of the winds. But the mastery of the helm—the art of adjusting the sails—is, and forever remains, your sovereign right.”
2 short short stories from Alfred D Searls
The supernatural does not require foggy graveyards; it is closer and far more mundane. It manifests in a midnight kitchen, a crowded yet silent subway car, or a house where silence moves between rooms like an uninvited guest.
It’s a strange but probably not-so-strange thing that a beautifully-written account of the baking of bread, of illness and worry, of the beauty of the light on flying crows, the wind on the water, the glow through the mountains, would have such an enduring power to move us.
“She sees herself as a tool for social activism and what she does with this tool is to shape into images of self-affirmation.”
“Read Forugh’s poems and you’ll find the very forces that shape our moment: misogyny, censorship, nativism, consumerism, the annihilating violence of war. Read her poems and you’ll find that they, like all the best poems, don’t merely offer a reprieve from the abuses and terrors of the world, but a repudiation of the forces that make those abuses and terrors possible: ignorance and political regimes for which ignorance has been and will always be their life’s blood.”
“I always try to paint beauty, but some people say my paintings aren’t beautiful. Well I have beauty in my mind …”
“For the most part the armies marched through the valley, so that they might do battle elsewhere, but some, like the soldiers of the crocked cross and the soldiers of the blood red banner, had stayed and fought and died, and in so doing they watered the rich, rocky soil with their blood, and their sacrifice gave nourishment to the legends of the nationalist and internationalist alike.”
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