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. WINTERSEven after he was elected, and even now, it still feels impossible. It felt like we had fallen into this wormhole of history.
More Ben H. Winters Quotes
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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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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 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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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 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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Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.
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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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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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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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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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History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things.
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Our political divides have become our personal divides.
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There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.
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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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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