penrosereads

[penrosereads]

“This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren’t? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn’t see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.”

[penrosereads]

“As long as we were willing to be upset, we didn’t have to get jobs or go to school. We could weasel out of anything except eating and taking our medication.”

[penrosereads]

“Events not to be controlled have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion; and the passion should be held in reverence…” - Edgar Allan Poe

[penrosereads]

“Suicide is a form of murder—premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive.”

[penrosereads]

“What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?”

[penrosereads]

“Endogenous or exogenous, nature or nurture—it’s the great mystery of mental illness.”

[penrosereads]

“Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can’t go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling, that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family’s mental health.”

[penrosereads]

“All of us had learned by default to treasure freedom and would do anything we could to get it and keep it. The question was, what could we do? Could we get up every morning and take a shower and put on clothes and go to work? Could we think straight? Could we not say crazy things when they occurred to us? Some of us could; some of us couldn’t. In the world’s terms, though, all of us were tainted.”

[penrosereads]

“Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers, or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?”

[penrosereads]

“Black power is the dungeon-side view of Monticello—which is to say, the view taken in struggle. And black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors. Even the Dreamers—lost in their great reverie—feel it, for it is Billie they reach for in sadness, and Mobb Deep is what they holler in boldness, and Isley they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha is the last sound they hear before dying. We have made something down here. We have taken the one-drop rules of Dreamers and flipped them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.”

[penrosereads]

“Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world. But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious. And you are here now, and you must live—and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else’s country, but in your own home.”

[penrosereads]

“This chasm makes itself known to us in all kinds of ways. A little girl wanders home, at age seven, after being teased in school and asks her parents, “Are we niggers and what does this mean?” Sometimes it is subtle—the simple observation of who lives where and works what jobs and who does not. Sometimes it’s all of it at once.”

[penrosereads]

“Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.”

[penrosereads]

“And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do.”

[penrosereads]

Anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

Virginia Woolf, from Jacob's Room, 26 October 1922

[penrosereads]

reading a terry pratchett book is the best pick-me-up when i'm tired and stressed! i also bought some new classics recently and i can't wait to get stuck into them soon.

[penrosereads]

“‘You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid to be you.’”