The Nickel Boys

Turner wasn’t angry that Jaimie lied to their faces. He admired liars who kept on lying even though their lies were obvious, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. Another proof of one’s powerlessness before other people.

Even Turner had cause to smile, as he touched up the Gingerbread Man card and remembered the folk hero’s rallying cry: “You can’t catch me, you can’t catch me.” A good way to be. He didn’t remember how the story ended.

Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.

The capacity to suffer. Elwood—all the Nickel boys—existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap? We will meet your phys

How to get through the day if every indignity capsized you in a ditch? One learned to focus one’s attention.

was impossible, like loving the one who wanted to destroy you, but that was the message of the movement: to trust in the ultimate decency that lived in every human heart.

We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.

There are people who trick you and deliver emptiness with a smile, while others rob you of your self-respect. You need to remember who you are.

It was crazy to run and crazy not to run. How could a boy look past the school’s property line, see that free and living world beyond, and not contemplate a dash to freedom? To write one’s own story for once. To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one’s humanity.