Quotes from Jeff Hobbs

If you want to, and you don't, then that's on you.

Like a bird handled by humans whose flock would not accept it back, Rob now wore the unwashable scent of the Ivy League.

He saw something more in those eyes. The emotion wasn't nakedly apparent, but Mr. Cawley was a professional at reading the subtleties of people. The elderly and wildly successful credit card magnate believed that certain human frailties could actually help fuel success. Insecurity drove billionaire entrepreneurs. Emotional instability made for superb art. The need for attention built great political leaders. But anger, in his experience, led only to inertia.

Friendship, in this community, was simple: it meant being there. Friendship necessitated no pride, no projection of having your shit together if you didn't, no passivity, no judgment—and especially no fronting, which had characterized so many relationships at Yale. Friendship here was the most dependable means by which they were going to get through their various lives.

and it's like nothing matters, not even time, and for a couple hours I can just be.

Raquel's mother had driven her fiercely to do well in school, such that high academic prowess had been the only option. Others had come upon money by luck, or had relatives acting as patrons. Rob had had none of those things. All he'd had was a home, and a harried home at that, paired with his own drive. What he'd achieved, he'd achieved almost exclusively on his own.

The men her girlfriends dated were too often angry and muttering about oppression. One of the reasons she took to Skeet later in life was that he never went to that place; he believed with a firm positivity that he didn't need to waste time resenting real or imagined social constructs because he would always be ahead of them. The individual, not the people, was responsible for success or failure.

Deeper in their hearts, they were debating what kind of man they wanted their son to be.

People bring their own shit to the way they see things. If they don't believe what you're doing is right, that's their choice. But the choice has more to do with them than with you. Don't worry about it. You made your own choice.

As a kid who had geared much of his life around the concerns of others, he was neither accustomed to nor comfortable fielding inquiries about himself.

he wondered how a person as bright and deserving as Rob Peace could have made the choices, beginning on the night of that banquet, that had resulted in this. And he figured that the choices hadn't necessarily begun on that night. Most likely, they'd begun on the night he was born, and not all of them had been his to make.

He was known to hit low, drive upward from the hips, and flip other boys over his shoulder and onto their backs, knocking the wind out of them on the glass-littered asphalt, sometimes causing a fumble and always inciting cheers from onlookers up and down the street––especially when he punctuated the hit with the words "Patent that!"...This permissible violence was unique in that it elicited respect from the victim rather than calls for retribution.

Her son seemed to be belatedly rebelling against all his celebrated accomplishments- as well as the responsibilities inherent in them, the obligations to own his talents.In that rebellion, she saw a young man who was confused and upset that his life wasn't stacking up to be what he and everyone around him had always assumed it would.

Oswaldo was flummoxed by the fact that his friend could be so quiet, almost embarrassed, about his academic acumen, yet so damn loud and proud of his status as a premier campus drug dealer. "I've never met anyone so smart but so fucking dumb," he told Rob.

A poetry professor had once defined romance to me as "bringing two people together when every force in the universe is working to keep them apart.

In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.

Rob's confidence was communicated with a simple look that said, If you want to, and you don't, then that's on you.

gangster rappers like Ludacris

And now Rob was about to turn 5, she was thinking about elementary school, determined to send her son to a private school. That cost money. Not much, but not much was relative. She knew that the security required to afford tuition would be a stretch to maintain anywhere else except on Chapman Street.

Where they lived, being known by this label [uppity] meant that you thought you were better than everyone else around you. That you deserved more, and that given the opportunity, you would leave this place behind without a second thought. There was shame in thinking like that.

half the generation already lost, the other half just trying to get home each day.

Rob was always trying to get inside these people, figure them out, learn their problems, provide solutions.

When she lost him, she lost not only her only child but all those decades of sacrifice—she lost her identity and her hope.

He tried to explain how there was something cathartic about being in the water. You stared down at the thick black line scrolling steadily beneath you, and all you heard was the rush of water past your ears, and a life that at times felt cosmically complicated was reduced to the simplest elements: oxygen, buoyancy, propulsion.