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A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers

Book by Omar El Akkad · 11 quotes · Americans, Anger, Women

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A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers Quotes

“I had never known Bonnie to talk like this. So depressed and ... gnomic? But then I remembered it was her birthday, so perhaps she was mourning the way all women of our age were supposed to mourn the precipitous vanishing of our worth, like, Whoops, time to grow a personality, which the world will also devalue!”

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“Meanwhile, nobody said, Haha, dang, isn’t it bad enough that rape and assault and abuse and harassment and boyfriends doing the emotional psychosexual whatever equivalent of sticking their beefy hand into your brain and wearing it like a baseball mitt or a puppet so they can just really move it around and infinity et cetera happens to so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so many of us, and we can’t even talk about it without having to apologize afterward?”

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“Father said he wasn’t worried. He said Americans are like this, brittle with privilege. Sometimes anger robs them of their senses and they make bad decisions, but in a way this was really just another testament to American greatness—how adept the United States was at surviving its endless self-inflicted wounds. We live in a good country, he said, and it will be good again.”

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“There are stories about perfection, but those stories are lies. No one ever made the world better by being perfect. There is only mess in humans, and sometimes that mess turns to magic, and sometimes that magic turns to kindness, to salvation, to survival.”

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“It’s quiet for a second and so I start to think. About how people take from each other. They take and take. Our world itself is a great big taking. And life is just giving. We give away everything we have, one day at a time, until we can’t give no more. I guess that’s the price of living.”

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“Take care of your brother, Lydia, and take care of yourself; be at all times guarded. And never forget that this country despises above all else this thing they call people of color, sees them not as people at all but as harbingers of a future it can’t control. I remember liking that moniker: of color. What a thing to be in a country so black and white.”

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“And, yeah, she had known when she signed the mortgage papers that she was agreeing to a certain degree of surveillance in exchange for finally living what she’d been raise to consider the American Dream. She had simply never considered that one day she might prefer waking up.”

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“The man on TV said Americans are good people you know but they only vote one of two ways with their hearts or with their heads and let’s hope it’s not too late let’s hope it’s not too late but thank the Lord this time they came to their senses and voted with their heads. But it didn’t seem to me like they voted with their heads. It seemed like they voted with their fangs.”

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“Father sat in his easy chair, occasionally shaking his head and saying how this was just the way the cycle worked—one time they vote for what they believe themselves to be and the next they get angry and vote for what they really are.”

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