“Maintain your dignity. Be confident even though you might feel like shit. This sorrow will end, though it isn’t over yet.“
—Hazlitt

“They ate dinner in silence. Her husband did not look at her. Her face annoyed him, he did not know why. She could be good-looking but there were times when she was not. Her face was like a series of photographs, some of which should have been thrown away. Tonight it was like that.”
—James Salter

“What
white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a
traumatized community is absolution. They want absolution from the
racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile
America’s racist sins. They want absolution from their silence in the
face of all manner of racism, great and small. They want to believe it
is possible to heal from such profound and malingering trauma because to
face the openness of the wounds racism has created in our society is
too much. I, for one, am done forgiving.”
—Roxane Gay

“…The Confederate flag and this clownish array of gutless
presidential candidates are not the important issues here. What matters
is the cost our nation continues to pay for its failure to regulate guns
and to achieve racial justice. If it took the slaughter of nine people
in a church to get a single state to remove a flag that is, after all,
only a historic symbol of racism, you have to wonder how many people
will have to die to end the implementation of racism, including the
homicidal police practices and restrictive new voting laws that have
proliferated in the Obama era. The notion that pulling down a flag in
South Carolina somehow amounts to a major breakthrough in American
racial progress is absurd. That flag never should have been flown at the
Capitol in the first place. It was first installed there in 1961 as an
implicit act of resistance to the growing civil-rights movement. It
should have been trashed long before a mass murder belatedly sealed its
demise.”
—Frank Rich

“Time travel should be about more important things, like peeping ancient wonders: pyramids, or hanging gardens, or a colossus plinthed above an Aegean harbor. It’s a chance to witness grim prehistory, as some Neanderthal family naïvely ferries Aperol spritzers to the new Cro-Magnon clan next door. I’d love to find out if the Red Sea really did part for Moses, just like in the movie with Charlton Heston. Maybe I’d visit Heston on the set of Soylent Green, tell him the movie he’s shooting won’t amount to much but will spawn a fine nerdy catchphrase. I’d also take a moment to set him straight on guns. Because that’s another worthy approach to temporal displacement: the do-gooder package tour, the warn-Pompeii-kill-Hitler itinerary. It’s a dicey proposition, messing with the past. But wouldn’t my intrusions cancel each other out if I brought a teen Hitler to Pompeii just before Vesuvius blew? ‘I’ll leave you here,’ I’d say. ‘The new arts academy is just over that ridge!’…

“Perhaps my best bet would be a trip back to yesterday. I could pass on that brownie from the tray at the office, reply to those e-mails instead of resending them to myself as reminders to reply. I could tell my kids that I love them, rather than grunting orders and admonitions like ‘Teeth,’ ‘Clomping,’ ‘Tone.’ I could stop doing that thing where I leave one tiny corner of the kitchen counter dirty as an act of rebellion. I could give my wife a real back rub instead of one of those fake jobs designed to be so annoying that she’ll ask me to stop. I could, as people like to put it, be more present, more mindful. I could climb into my screeching, shuddering, time-busting jalopy and take the long voyage to right now. I could try again.”
—Sam Lipsyte

“Night fell, and I was shivering now, so Clara held me. Something subtle and real shifted inside our embrace—nothing detectable to an observer, but a change I registered in my bones. For the duration of our friendship, we’d trade off roles like this: anchor and boat, beholder and beheld. We must have looked like some Janus-faced statue, our chins pointing east and west. An unembarrassed silence seemed to be on loan to us from the distant future, where we were already friends.”
—Karen Russell