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. WINTERSIn terms of optimism, I am optimistic. I do think that, in the long term, that America will right itself. I have to think so.
More Ben H. Winters Quotes
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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 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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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 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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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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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 it’s hard sometimes for people to grapple with the real-life consequences of political change.
BEN H. WINTERS -
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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A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.
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There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.
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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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Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.
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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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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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History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things.
BEN H. WINTERS