Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it.

We are, Black people, here and there, victims of the West—a people held just outside its liberal declarations, but kept close enough to be enchanted with its promises.

Paulo Freire wrote of the “banking” system of education, in which students are treated as receptacles for information and judged on how efficiently—how “meekly”—they “receive, memorize, and repeat” that information. A teacher delivers the student information and the student succeeds by repeating it.

the limits of genius, about the need to walk the land, as opposed to intuit and hypothesize from the edge. There are dimensions in your words—rhythm, content, shape, feeling. And so too with the world outside. The accretion of imperfect, discomfiting life must be seen and felt so that the space in your mind, gray, automatic, and square, fills with

But I know how sadness can exert its own gravity, growing more powerful the longer it holds you.

You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world. And it is not enough to stand against these dissemblers. There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path,

a figure standing at the edge of a sprawling forest tasked with mapping that forest with such precision that anyone who sees the map will feel themselves transported into the territory. The figure can see the snowy peaks in the distance and might conjure some theories as to what lies between them and those peaks—pine trees, foothills, a ravine with

If only I could be the one crafting the questions and organizing and interpreting the answers and then, with words, expressing the meaning I extracted from the quest.

In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.