Quotes About Awareness

When you don't fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else's eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you're still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound. You

You can stare right at something and not see what lies beneath the surface.

history has a habit of repeating itself, doesn't someone have to stay behind to shout out a warning? If not me, then who?

But you know, the word ignorance has an even more important word at its heart: ignore. And I don't think it's right to ignore the truth any longer.

Is it better not knowing the ugly truth, and pretending it doesn't exist? Or is it better to confront it, even though that knowledge may be a weight you carry around forever? I am about to give her my opinion when Eliza is

slowly in the tide of our opinions, oblivious that we are taking on water every time we open our mouths.

Busy is just a euphemism for being so focused on what you don't have that you never notice what you do. It's a defense mechanism. Because if you stop hustling—if you pause—you start wondering why you ever thought you wanted all those things. I can no longer tell the sky from the sea, but I can hear the waves. A loss of sight; a gain of insight.

All mothers worry, but Black mothers, we have to worry a little bit more. "Even walking can be dangerous. Just being can be dangerous, if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But passive racism? It's noticing there's only one person of color in your office and not asking your boss why. It's reading your kid's fourth-grade curriculum and seeing that the only black history covered is slavery, and not questioning why.

If you take away anything from this novel, I hope it is an awareness of the cognitive and emotional intelligence of these beautiful animals—and the understanding that it is up to all of us to protect them.

Dying is a misnomer. You're alive, until you're not.

Lucy} knew other things too, more important non-school things. She knew that when grown-ups lowered their voices it meant you had to listen harder.

You learn how they live their lives, and you speak their language well enough to blend in with them. But how many white people you know who go out of their way to see Tyler Perry movies so they can learn how to act around Black people?

And there is a place in you that you don't even know exists, where you can simply stand back and watch without feeling any pain.

There's nothing worse than silence, strung like heavy beads on too delicate a conversation.

seeing Darija or doing anything but my

Truth expands until it can choke you.

If you don't know where you've come from, how in Heaven's name will you ever figure out where you're going?

I look around at the curl of clouds in the sky, the sun glittering on the ocean in the distance. A picture postcard. Just a few hundred miles away this virus is killing people so fast that they don't have room for bodies, but you would never know it from where I stand.

I have this math teacher, Mr. Allen. He said that when you're a point, all you see is the point. When you're a line, all you see is the line and the point. When you're in three dimensions, you see three dimensions and lines and points. Just because we can't see a fourth dimension doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means we haven't reached it yet.

Cruelty is always sort of fun until you realize that something's getting hurt. It

Death is the guest you didn't invite: arriving when you least expect it, when you least need it, and when you least want it. It's a blow from behind. A knife in the back. The shadow that's following you. It's why you always keep looking over your shoulder.

You've never gone down the street and had someone cross it just because you're black. You've never had someone look at you with disgust because you're holding a baby and you forgot to put on your wedding ring. You want to do something about it-take action, scream at them, tell them they're idiots-but you can't. Being on the fringe is the most disempowering feeling, Jordan. You get so used to the world being a certain way, there seems to be no escape from it.

Mayflies have the shortest life span on earth. Like, twenty-four hours. Wouldn't you feel terrible if you caused an even more untimely death?