Fe Wacyk

“Our world is not safe. It is a toxic swamp populated by predators and parasites. The odds are stacked against us from the moment of conception. We survive only because we fight the elements, hunger, disease, each other. And, although civilization promises us safe harbor, that promise is a fairy tale. Only the storm is real. It comes for each of us. And we cannot win. We can only choose how we will suffer our defeat.

We can meekly take our beatings, and die like lemmings, finding solace in the belief that we shall one day inherit the earth.

Or, we can plunge into the chaos with eyes wide open, taking comfort instead from the bruises, scars, and broken bones which prove that we fought to live and die as gods.”
― J.K. Franko, Life for Life

“Poor Christopher-John had fallen into the hands of Miss. Daisy Crocker. I greatly sympathized him, but as in everything else, Christopher John tried to see the bright side in having to face such a shrew every morning. "Maybe she done changed," he said hopefully on the first day of school. However, when classes were over he was noticeably quiet.

Well?" I asked him.

He shrugged dejectedly and admitted, "She still the same.”
― Mildred D. Taylor, Let the Circle Be Unbroken

“Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, "If you give a [n****r] an inch, he will take an ell. A [n****r] should know nothing but to obey his master--to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best [n****r] in the world. Now," said he, "if you teach that [n****r] (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“if he doesn’t want to come home, then we will bring home to him.’ And that’s why we are all here.”
― Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain