Quotes from Jeff Hobbs

As a child, books had been his passageway into foreign, sometimes utopian worlds. Carnival wasn't just an incarnation of that passageway in reality; it was everything that lay on the other side, where the only thing that mattered was the moment, and millions of people were able to inhabit that moment with ease and, predominantly, with bliss.

Unbeknownst to me, from the beginning of freshman year Rob and Oswaldo had been drawn away from Yale via their friends on the dining hall and custodial staffs, outward into the city of New Haven. Rob considered these excursions a much-needed dose of reality, the social equivalent of an antidepressant.

Niggers just like to start shit," he said. "They don't value human interaction, let alone human life. They're just stupid, period. They walk around, trying to act hard, trying to be bangers...That's all a nigger cares about: acting hard. Fronting." "What about the brothers?" I asked. This word felt much safer. "A brother's like me. He just wants to take care of his own and chill.

In East Orange, initiations were completed by murdering someone, for no other reason than to prove to a tremendously cold, tremendously tight brotherhood that you possessed the hardness required to watch their backs.

Lyric's death reminded us that having a Yale degree on our résumés could open many doors, but it couldn't protect us from life, which didn't much care about résumés.

Rob's small room on the second floor of the Chapman Street house, a three-shelf bookcase was packed with black-and-white composition books, the front and back of each page filled with single-spaced notes from various classes. Tavarus thought, Damn, this is how you go places.

At Yale, most everyone (except Oswaldo Gutierrez) refrained from telling Rob what to do, because of the way he'd grown up in Newark. In Newark, most everyone (except Oswaldo Gutierrez) refrained from telling Rob what to do, because of the way he'd gone to Yale.

On that night he made clear to his secret society that the fundamental conflict of his life was founded on precisely that belief: the white establishment would always keep the common black man down in order to cover their own asses.

With the world and its goings-on constantly blasting through our computer screens, relevance was the thing we craved, whether it was obtained in the media spotlight or with the accumulation of wealth or in being counter-everything or finding an apartment in a cool neighborhood.