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We forget the conditions – not only in slavery – but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opportunity. Or we forget today’s incarceration rates, and educational and housing discrimination; all of these things.

Ben H. Winters

We think, “Well, what are you gonna do?” In a way, that little instinct, that “What are you gonna do?” is the most dangerous thing in the world.
BEN H. WINTERS

Dangerous Instinct Little Think Way
One thing that fiction does is it allows us to take big picture questions, big issues, big moral and socio-political changes and see how they play out on real people’s lives, with real individuals.
BEN H. WINTERS

Issues Moral Play Real
I think it’s hard sometimes for people to grapple with the real-life consequences of political change.
BEN H. WINTERS

Real Sports Thinking
Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.
BEN H. WINTERS

Fiction Prophesy Special
The membrane between where we are right now and a very different reality, is so much thinner than we like to think. Things can go back, and things can go to the side, and things can go to places where we might not even have been on guard that they might go.
BEN H. WINTERS

Reality Support Thinking
I think that fiction has this special responsibility or this special ability to help people to empathize, to demand of people that they understand other individuals and other people’s experiences.
BEN H. WINTERS

People Responsibility Thinking
There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.
BEN H. WINTERS

Detectives Littles Novelty
That one lesson that African American communities have learned over the centuries in America is that you can’t just take for granted that things will steadily get better and better and better until they’re great. It is fits and starts. It is backward and forward.
BEN H. WINTERS

Community Country Get Better
I think that, we as a culture, feel like politics is one sector of our lives that can feel apart from our personal lives and the cultural things we’re interested in and the sports we watch. It feels like this separate, different thing.
BEN H. WINTERS

Culture Interested Lives Personal Politics Sports
Our political divides have become our personal divides.
BEN H. WINTERS

Become Divide Personal Political
History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things.
BEN H. WINTERS

Better Linear Movement Thing
I think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone’s mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while.
BEN H. WINTERS

Imagination Mind Thinking
Even after he was elected, and even now, it still feels impossible. It felt like we had fallen into this wormhole of history.
BEN H. WINTERS

Even Fallen Feel History Impossible Now
We spend so much time, these days, on forms of literature that don’t rise to be literature, and I’m speaking about Twitter posts and quick and hot takes on different websites. We sort of zoom from thing to thing like a hummingbird.
BEN H. WINTERS

Different Hot Post Zoom
A book is not a tweet. A book is not a half-hour television show. A book requires for both reader and writer sustained discipline attention. It asks you to immerse yourself in something and really deeply feel it.
BEN H. WINTERS

Attention Book Discipline Half Require
A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.
BEN H. WINTERS

Blood Blue Depression

We forget the conditions – not only in slavery – but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opportunity. Or we forget today’s incarceration rates, and educational and housing discrimination; all of these things.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

We forget the conditions – not only in slavery – but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opportunity. Or we forget today’s incarceration rates, and educational and housing discrimination; all of these things.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Ben H. Winters Quotes