Quotes from Jeff Hobbs

If you go into something, you better make it hard. Otherwise what's the point?

Look, anything you do, if it isn't hard, it isn't doing anything for you. So you're better off not doing it. Use your time somewhere else.

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.

believed were some of his strongest: the work ethic to locate those homes, the social skills to negotiate with people ranging from rich lenders to working-class contractors to poor renters, and the desire to make money in crafty but fundamentally honest ways.

Why are you here?" Rob asked. "Because we have to play a sport; it's required," Truman replied. "Okay, so play it, don't just fuck around." "I'm not fucking around." "You're not making it hard." Truman didn't know what that meant. "If you go into something, you better make it hard. Otherwise what's the point?

Nobody, it seemed, was making the money he'd thought he would make, inhabiting the home he'd thought he would inhabit, doing the thing he'd thought he would do in life. Nobody was fulfilling the dreams harbored on graduation day almost ten years earlier.

He wanted to instill that sociability in his son; he believed that being curious about people was one of the few crucial life skills that could be fully nurtured in a place like East Orange.

It's like you can't have a real conversation with anyone.

But a deeper transition affected people of color in this dazed context. Before course selections and extra-curricular sign-up sheets, before bags could even be unpacked in rooms, black students had to situate themselves within their own race. The process was complicated, conflicting, usually silent, highly fraught, and wholly invisible to their white classmates. Most of whom had never actively had to consider the role of race in their lives.

What had happened wasn't supposed to have happened and yet, they still rendered the predictable media spin of potential squandered, the gift of education sacrificed to the allure of thug life, etc. Not only simplistic, but also offensively so.

it was the nature of being a person, and everything they did—every single thing, in school or at home, with others or alone, conscious or unconscious, meaningful or nonsensical, every single thing—was geared toward discovering what exactly it meant to be a person. The meaning would always elude them, because elusiveness was in fact its very heart.

But words mattered, more so in Newark than many other places. In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.

Flowy]'d undertaken this mainly because he'd known that going to public school, with girls, would sentence him to fatherhood by age sixteen, and he wanted to evade that pattern, one from which he himself had been born.

He had a natural curiosity about the stories of those around him paired with a brain that was quick to draw insights from within each of these stories.

In his evolving view, the fact that he'd gone to those schools and accomplished those things didn't need to complicate what life had once been about: the simplicity of providing for oneself, without expectations.

Looking back now, it is easy to feel as if she alone knew that success and happiness in life were more elusive even than an Ivy League diploma.

The park was a highly secure place for people to do drugs after dark, more secure even than homes and apartments. The police didn't make regular patrols because they were too busy answering 911 calls. Policemen were more likely to enter a user's building during the night, answering a domestic abuse call from down the hallway, than they were to make a pass through the Orange Park playground.

He talked about what he believed defined a Real Man: someone who had honor, curiosity, respect for women, and took responsibility for his people.

Our collective information regarding his death was still limited, which brought forward the sadder fact that, at the end of it all, none of us had actually known Rob as well as we thought we did, as well as we should have, as well as—with just a little more effort—we could have.

She was also taking a big risk by hoping this sacrifice would mean something. If Rob turned out like any other rough boy in the neighborhood––if her son wasn't special like she believed he was––she feared the disappointment that would follow too much striving on her part.

men and women who'd constantly filed through our common room, wearing hoodies and piercings—uniform in their aversion to uniformity—

The student body, too, felt more diverse. Rob spoke often of "real people" with his friends, by which he meant people who struggled, like they all did. On the Ivy League campus visits, any sense of daily or long-term struggle had seemed airbrushed. At Johns Hopkins––and maybe he was only imagining this because of the Ivy League stigma absent in Baltimore––Rob believed the average student had worked harder and sacrificed more to be there.

The word "fronting" was important to Rob. A coward who acted tough was fronting. A nerd who acted dumb was fronting. A rich kid who acted poor was fronting. Rob found the instinct very offensive, and in college he saw it all around.

In that house, Rob read. Rather, Jackie read to him, but she felt as if he were reading along with her. With the opening of a book, a shift occurred in his eyes and he nestled an inch deeper into her lap while angling his chin upward, and he seemed to age a year or two. Not a reader herself, Jackie went to the local library for the first time and pulled the popular titles: the Berenstain Bears, Richard Scarry wordbooks, Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle.