The things I tell my pillow

Nov 11

“American mainstream is obsessed with black creative genius - be it music, walk, style - but at the same time puts a low priority on the black social misery which is the very context out of which that creativity flows.” Dr. Cornell West (via cliftonvandyke)

(via theuppitynegras)

Aug 6

“In this country, ‘American’ means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” Toni Morrison (via monocled—misanthrope)

(via limb-of-satan)

Jul 6

“Young American girls in the United States are so imbued and fortified with rational ideas that love, the flower of life, has deserted their youth.” A few laughs from Stendhal’s “De l’Amour.”

Apr 19

bbook:

Everywhere in that his diners, motels, gas stations and porches seem so commonplace, so ubiquitously American. Nowhere in that this very ubiquity frees them from specific addresses, cities and street corners. If the diner in “Nighthawks” can be found only in the depths of the American psyche, may it live on.

Nighthawks State of Mind

(via oldfilmsflicker)

Feb 18

“Does anything kill as petty worries do? And in America we worry all the time. That, in fact, is I think the great use of suffering, if it’s tragic suffering—it takes you away from yourself—and petty suffering does exactly the reverse, and kills your inspiration.”

Feb 1

“Like many Americans, I long to know the past. There’s a sense of loss in America today, a feeling of disconnectedness. We’re no longer quite sure who we are or how we got here. More and more of us are rummaging in the attic, trying to retrieve our history. We draw genealogical charts and hang old quilts on the wall. We seem to hope that if we can find out our family stories and trace our roots and save the old cookie jars and coal scuttles, we just might rescue ourselves and be made whole.” Bobbie Ann Mason in the preface of her memoir, Clear Springs.

Jan 31

“All American fiction, it seems to me, is circumscribed by place; I have a feeling that my work ends up being labelled as regional simply because fewer people come from my particular place.” Leigh Allison Wilson on the marginalization of Appalachian writers.

Sep 21

sexismandthecity:

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. -John Steinbeck

(via oki-pierogi)