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.
BEN H. WINTERSFiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.
More Ben H. Winters Quotes
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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.
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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.
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There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.
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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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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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It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it.
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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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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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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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A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.
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Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.
BEN H. WINTERS -
Our political divides have become our personal divides.
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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.
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I think that if there is a great gift that this [Donald Trump] election gave us, is this sort of sense of vigilance, the sense that we have to remain on guard. We have to support our free press.
BEN H. WINTERS