“For much of my life, I’ve thought that it hasn’t mattered that I’m Jewish, that it in no way changes how I live in the world… Now I think it matters a lot that I’m Jewish. Though it has nothing to do with what I believe — and everything to do with what other people believe. They think I’m different.”

“Because to everything there is a season, and the season for ‘trying on identities like costumes’ is somewhere between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six. Anything beyond that, and all you’re actually doing is simply ‘wearing a costume.’”

“Let him expand upon all his twisted thoughts and ideals on a grand stage. Let him see just how meaningless his words really are, because at the end of the day he can’t change what we are.”

Teju Cole chats with Steve Paulson about the beauty of sentence fragments and his meditative approach to combining text and photography in his book, Blind Spot.

“While it’s possible for this term to exist in a neutral sense, it most certainly does not.  This term exists for the sole purpose of silencing black people, policing black thought, and to protect white privilege and white comfort.”

“I couldn’t cry during the flood, but I did beg. Please God, just don’t let my kids lose their home. Because I know what it’s like to not be able to go home.” Anna left her home in the Soviet Union at age 7; her daughter Alma fled Harvey’s floodwaters at the same age.