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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.

Ben H. Winters

The election of Donald Trump is, to me, this very clownish personality with no political experience, who had literally been using fascist slogans in his campaign. It had seemed so impossible.
BEN H. WINTERS

Campaign Personality Political
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
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.
BEN H. WINTERS

Country Optimistic Thinking
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

Gift Great Press Sense Support Think
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
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
Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.
BEN H. WINTERS

Fiction Prophesy Special
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 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
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.
BEN H. WINTERS

Book Falling Love Writing
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

Educational Long Opportunity
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
A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.
BEN H. WINTERS

Blood Blue Depression
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.
BEN H. WINTERS

Enemy People President
History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things.
BEN H. WINTERS

Better Linear Movement Thing

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Ben H. Winters Quotes