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. WINTERSThe 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.
More Ben H. Winters Quotes
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One thing we’ve learned about Donald Trump – this candidate first, president-elect, and now president – is that he has this sort of reptilian instinct for rooting out supposed enemies and finding people he can whip up distrust into rage.
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Even after he was elected, and even now, it still feels impossible. It felt like we had fallen into this wormhole of history.
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There is no shortage of ways that people profit indirectly from the misery and cruelty in other places. Even now, the shirts we wear and the tomatoes we eat. There are unfortunately unfair and inhumane conditions – including literal slavery – all over the world.
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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.
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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.
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It is really something, the extent to which we allow ourselves to live without thinking of things that we know, in the abstract, are bad, and are going on right now, somewhere far away.
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Our political divides have become our personal divides.
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In terms of optimism, I am optimistic. I do think that, in the long term, that America will right itself. I have to think so.
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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.
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Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We pretend that everything that has happened happened long ago, and then we act as if we all now just treat each other equally, everything will be fine.
BEN H. WINTERS






