Our political divides have become our personal divides.
BEN H. WINTERSWe 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.
More Ben H. Winters Quotes
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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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There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.
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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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I think it’s hard sometimes for people to grapple with the real-life consequences of political change.
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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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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.
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Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.
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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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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.
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History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
BEN H. WINTERS