“ James Baldwin’s My Dungeon Shook—Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation, Carolina De Robertis
“ James Baldwin’s My Dungeon Shook—Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation, published in The Fire Next Time in 1963 (the same year Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., penned anothe… Carolina De Robertis
“ Nothing changes if we just feel shitty about being White. And nothing changes if we refuse to talk about it. The opposite of white pride does not have to be white shame. We can’t push it away and pret… Carolina De Robertis
“ No, I wanted to say, he didn't cut off her hands because he didn't have to, he had cut them off long before, with years of keeping all authority in his own palms, all the rules and all the power and a… Carolina De Robertis
“ I wondered whether I had gone insane. If so, I thought, then this is what it feels like; I would never have guessed the world would still appear so sharp and vivid, the streets the same, the clouds th… Carolina De Robertis
“ It was still, at the root, the same dance: the same two bodies, connecting, gliding together, two aching souls reaching for each other and finding more than could be told. And then, in the fourth song… Carolina De Robertis
“ But in the morning I would always rise and polish the surface of myself, a gleaming, confident young woman, an excellent student and good daughter starting her fourth year at the university, moving sm… Carolina De Robertis
“ What makes the self?Experiences. Acculturation.What else?I don't know.What's within you.She says, I don't know what was within me and what got put there by my life as it was lived.You can never know t… Carolina De Robertis
“ That people you don’t know are worth knowing, that they have something to teach you. That learning about them – that encountering new ideas – doesn’t threaten you, it enriches you. (Celeste Ng) Carolina De Robertis
“ But language is malleable, and it is not always on the side of truth. This is something every writer knows. Words make and unmake the world with terrifying rapidity, and they do so without moral disti… Carolina De Robertis
“ In that moment, I realized that no matter what words I chose and no matter how much time I spent in telling, I would never be able to express my full experience...There are some experiences that only… Carolina De Robertis
“ Words are incomplete and yet we need them. They are the cups that give our memories shape, and keep them from trickling away. Carolina De Robertis
“ As if music could be crushed like a condemned building or a stubborn anarchist. But it could not. It always rose and returned, vital, immense, fortified by new instruments, new shapes, new musicians c… Carolina De Robertis
“ He does not look at the dancers, does not acknowledge her, sitting and staring. He is steeped in a private aural world. He drew out longer notes than her papa ever had; he was more forceful with the b… Carolina De Robertis
“ That's what happens to melodies: they get lost in the air. Just like memories. And the body. Memories and melodies and the body dissolve after we die. A musical instrument is not like the body, not at… Carolina De Robertis
“ It was her grandfather who'd told her the tale of this particular violin, over and over, as if the telling could stave off loss, as if the weight and scope of human history were not found in books or… Carolina De Robertis
“ She didn't mind the sacrifice. It seemed enough for a life, to give yourself to music the way nuns give themselves to God. To vow. To surrender. Only music, after all, made life bearable. Only with mu… Carolina De Robertis
“ The human story is one of continual branching movement, out of Africa to every corner of the globe. When people talk of blood and soil, as if their ancestors sprung fully formed from the earth of a pa… Carolina De Robertis
“ Books were already a familiar refuge, after all, and they still took me in without the slightest judgment. They don’t close to you the way a person can. You might feel as though you don’t belong anywh… Carolina De Robertis
“ Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. (Junot Diaz) Carolina De Robertis
