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Quote by Zetta Elliott

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A Wish After Midnight

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Zetta Elliott

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“Few ideas in all of human history have been more thoroughly misunderstood than the simple concept of evolution. Intellectuals in Victorian England, eager to use the science of their time to bolster a class system already cracking under the weight of its own injustice, invented the notion that some living things- and thus some people- are "more evolved" than others. That turn of phrase is still much used today, but in the real world, it is quite simple nonsense. Every living being is just as evolved as every other, because every living thing has been shaped by evolution over the exact same period of time since life first evolved”

“America's elites today, especially progressive ones, often don't realize how judgmental they are. They disdain tacky things, and, not coincidentally, those tacky things--fake tans, big hair, pro wrestling, chrome bull testicles hanging from the back of a big truck--are usually associated with lower-income Americans.”

“But to them, I knew, I was a go-between, they thought of me in terms of another person. When Lord Trimingham wanted Marian, when Marian wanted Ted, they turned to me. The confidences Marian had made me had been forced out of her. With Ted it was different. He felt he owed me something - me, Leo: the tribute of one nature to another. I did not like to think of him giving up the things he cared for and sleeping on the ground. I could not believe it was softer than the beds at Brandham; besides, he might be killed. There was a lot of him to be killed, and what there was he carried about with him, it was not spread out over houses and parklands.”

“[…] but the longer I considered the position, education, &c., of the parties, the less I felt justified in judging and blaming either him or Miss Ingram for acting in conformity to ideas and principles instilled into them, doubtless, from their childhood. All their class held these principles: I supposed, then, they had reasons for holding them, such as I could not fathom. It seemed to me that, were I a gentleman like him, I would take to my bosom only such a wife as I could love; but the very obviousness of the advantages to the husband’s own happiness offered by this plan convinced me that there must be arguments against its general adoption of which I was quite ignorant: otherwise I felt sure all the world would act as I wished to act.”

“For several years, I struggled to pass as a native, fell silent when I had no cultural capital to contribute to the conversation, which was most of the time. People called me shy, and I thought of myself that way. But I wasn't. Rather, I was incognito, unknowable -- strategically so, and it was a strategy born of shame and desperation, of the felt sense that who I really was would disturb people too much to let me stay. I was a stranger in a strange land, a trailer-trash girl from a fucked-up background whose test scores and polite smile and diligence let her slip inoffensively upward.”