Trayon White Ward Quotes

Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black. Eleven ~ Jesmyn Ward

As his amethyst eyes stared into hers, the air between them changed and she had the sense that he saw so much, too much. Especially as he said in a dark voice, "Will you let me feed you?"
Hypnotized, captivated, she whispered, "Yes. Please."
His smile revealed long, white fangs. "That is so the answer I was going for."

-Rehv & Ehlena ~ J.R. Ward

Black Lives Matter, the movement founded by the activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Callie's, and Opal Tometi, began with the premise that the incommensurable experience of systemic racism creates an unequal playing field. The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experiences as citizens. ~ Jesmyn Ward

The pie should be eaten "while it is yet florescent, white or creamy yellow, with the merest drip of candied juice along the edges, (as if the flavor were so good to itself that its own lips watered!) of a mild and modest warmth, the sugar suggesting jelly, yet not jellied, the morsels of apple neither dissolved nor yet in original substance, but hanging as it were in a trance between the spirit and the flesh of applehood ... then, O blessed man, favored by all the divinities! eat, give thanks, and go forth, 'in apple-pie order!'" ~ Henry Ward Beecher

I've lived inside every ward of Freedom Incorporated and found I don't like being lied to. Put me in prison; do not put me on the street then call that freedom. Do not force me to into believing block-cut neon red, white, and blue letters super-glued to the tall, outside company wall blinking Freedom Incorporated," chapter seven 'The Problem' from writer Cosmo Starlight's sixth edition novel "Freedom Incorporated. ~ Cosmo Starlight

I think things like food, the food of the south is sort of the common tie that binds us all, Black and White, the sense memories. It's a very particular part of the country. ~ Sela Ward

Jesus Christ ... he was not Omega's son. Was he?
"No." V said. "You are not. He just wants to believe you are. And he wants you to think you are. But that doesn't make it true."
There was a long silence. Then Rhage's hand landed on Butch's shoulder. "Besides, you don't look a thing like him. I mean ... hello? You are this beefy Irish white boy. He's like ... bus exhaust or some shit."
Butch glanced over at Hollywood. "You're sick, you know that?"
"Yeah, but you love me, right? Come on, I know you feel me. ~ J.R. Ward

He was taking another hit from his short-and-squat of Goose when his eyes skipped to the arched doorway of the room.
Jane hesitated as she glanced inside, her white coat opening as she leaned to the side, as if she were looking for him.
When their eyes met, she smiled a little. And then a lot.
His first impulse was to hide his own grin behind his Goose.
But then he stopped himself.
New world order. Come on, smile, motherfucker, he thought.
Jane gave a short wave and played it cool, which was what they usually did when they were together in public. Turning away, she headed over to the bar to make herself something.
"Hold up, cop," V murmured, putting his drink down and bracing his cue against the table. Feeling like he was fifteen, he put his hand-rolled between his teeth and tucked his wife-beater tightly into the waistband of his leathers. A quick smooth of the hair and he was . . . well, as ready as he could be.
He approached Jane from behind just as she struck up a convo with Mary - and when his shellan pivoted around to greet him, she seemed a little surprised that he'd come up to her.
"Hi, V . . . How are - "
Vishous stepped in close, putting them body to body, and then he wrapped his arms around her waist. Holding her with possession, he slowly bent her backward until she gripped his shoulders and her hair fell from her face. As she gasped, he said exactly what he thought: "I missed you."
And on that note ~ J.R. Ward

Kids will take shots of white strong liquor, they will smoke weed wrapped in thick blunts, they will even take Ecstasy or prescription pain pills, but they will not casually pull out an eight-ball of coke and push it across the table at a house party. Why? Because the specter of the cousin or the uncle or aunt or the mother or father who couldn't stop partying, whose teeth are burned brown from the pipe, sits next to them at the table. Young people who do coke lie about it, attempt to hide it, and often fight it. ~ Jesmyn Ward

It defies all common sense to send that roughneck ward politician back to the White House. ~ Robert Taft

A writer toils to combat the insufficiency plaguing his or her life. Every writer seeks to ward off the corrosive obliteration wrought by the passage of time upon memory by capturing on paper his or her present day thoughts on life. For these intrepid souls, writing not only entails a lifetime of work it also represents their very lifeblood spilled out onto sheets of virgin white paper. Writers' inkblot of words forms a pictograph for present and future generations to view; their thoughtful elucidations speak to us from the grave. Writers' words transcend time by creating indelible images that survive wars, famines, epidemics, and censorship. Thanks to great writers, every man, woman, or child can escape the confines of their own cloistered environment and converse with other people of every occupation and lifestyle whose communal heartbeats form the bloodstream of every city. Thanks to literary figures, each reader can peer into the depths of past generations whose eclectic filament forms the ever-evolving equitable eye in humankinds' collective consciousness, or colloquially what we refer to as humanity. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The flag of our stately battles, not struggles of wrath and greed,
Its stripes were a holy lesson, its spangles a deathless creed:
'T was red with the blood of freemen and white with the fear of the foe;
And the stars that fight in their courses 'gainst tyrants its symbols know. ~ Julia Ward Howe

Or been driven away," their father said, looking at the sixth pup. His fur was white, where the rest of the litter was grey. His eyes were as red as the blood of the ragged man who had died that morning. Bran thought it curious that this pup alone would have opened his eyes while the others were still blind. "An albino," Theon Greyjoy said with wry amusement. "This one will die even faster than the others." Jon Snow gave his father's ward a long, chilling look. "I think not, Greyjoy," he said. "This one belongs to me. ~ George R R Martin

As he vomited, he felt, though did not see, V come over. Forcing his head up, Butch groaned, "Help me ... "
I'm going to, trahyner. Give me your hand." As Butch held his palm up in despair, Vishous whipped off his glove and grabbed on good and hard. V's energy, that beautiful, white light, poured down Butch's arm and ripped through him in a blast, cleansing, renewing.
United by their clasped hands, they became again the two halves, the light and the dark. The Destroyer and the Savior. A whole. ~ J.R. Ward

That's the problem with white horses. You have to pay for them yourself or you'll always be using someone else's reins. ~ J.R. Ward

Golden framed and heavy, the painting.
Ocean waves curled in suspended time,
white-lipped and silent beneath brush-stroked blues
of sky. Gulls are captured there, mid-flight, fishing moments stolen in time, they soar without moving. ~ Christina M. Ward

[Rhage and Manny]
"You're doing great," he murmured as he noticed those white knuckled fists.
"Don't worry about me."
"Right, right…your brothers." Manny paused for a split second. "You're all right, you know that."
"F*ck…that…" The fighter smiled, flashing fangs. "I'm…perfect. ~ J.R. Ward

To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica's black mass. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Hey, asshole," Lash said to the sw'old-up one, "your boyfriend give you those p-tats? Or was he too busy fucking you in the ass?" The guy's eyes narrowed. "What'd you say to me?" The gangbanger shook his head. "Gotta be out ya damn mind, white boy." Skinhead laughed like a blender, high and fast. Who knew recruiting would be this easy, Lash thought. * ~ J.R. Ward

You're a freak. But I really can't accept these-'
Were you raised in a barn? Don't be ruuuuuude, my boy. They're a gift.'
Blay shook his head. 'Take them, John. You're just going to lose this argument, and it will save us from the theatrics.'
Theatrics?' Qhuinn leaped up and assumed a Roman oratory pose. 'Whither thou knowest thy ass from thy elbow, young scribe?'
Blay blushed. 'Come on-'
Qhuinn threw himself at Blay, grasping onto the guy's shoulders and hanging his full weight off him. 'Hold me. Your insult has left me breathless. I'm agasp.'
Blay grunted and scrambled to keep Qhuinn up off the floor. 'That's agape.'
Agasp sounds better.'
Blay was trying not to smile, trying not to be delighted, but his eyes were sparkling like sapphires and his cheeks were getting red. With a silent laugh, John sat on one of the locker room benches, shook out his pair of white socks, and pulled them on under his new old jeans. 'You sure, Qhuinn? 'Cause I have a feeling they're going to fit and you might change your mind.
Qhuinn abruptly lifted himself off Blay and straightened his clothes with a sharp tug. 'And now you offend my honor.' Facing off at John, he flipped into a fencing stance.
Touché.'
Blay laughed. 'That's en garde, you damn fool.'
Qhuinn shot a look over his shoulder. 'ça va, Brutus?'
Et tu?'
That would be tutu, I believe, and you can keep the cross-dressing to yourself, ya perv.'
Qhuinn flashed a b ~ J.R. Ward

Heads in the Women's Ward
On pillow after pillow lies
The wild white hair and staring eyes;
Jaws stand open; necks are stretched
With every tendon sharply sketched;
A bearded mouth talks silently
To someone no one else can see.
Sixty years ago they smiled
At lover, husband, first-born child.
Smiles are for youth. For old age come
Death's terror and delirium. ~ Philip Larkin

There is no such thing as white lies; a lie is as black as a coalpit, and twice as foul. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

No one else noticed, or cared. It was just something they did. Taking other people's livestock. Other people's lives. She watched the soldiers, hating them. They were different in so many ways, white and black, yellow and brown, skinny, short, tall, small, but they were all the same. Didn't matter if they wore finger-bone necklaces, or baby teeth on bracelets, or tattoos on their chests to ward off bullets. In the end, they were all mangled with battle scars and their eyes were all dead. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

The color white is not always what it seems to be. Watch for white handkerchiefs, handmade altars, homemade gumbo, and light summer dresses. ~ Martha Ward

The lightning cracked again, this time like it was right on top of us, feet away from arcing through the house, and her skin was white as stone and her hair waving, and I thought about the Medusa I'd seen in an old movie when I was younger, monstrous and green-scaled, and I thought: That's not it at all. She was beautiful as Mama. That's how she froze those men, with the shock of seeing something so perfect and fierce in the world. ~ Jesmyn Ward

It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.' ~ Jesmyn Ward

With the possible exception of grits, there's no food more Southern than greens, whose bitter smell while cooking down in salty fatback amid the jittery hiss of a pressure cooker is a Proustian madeleine for generations of black and white Southerners alike. The ~ Sela Ward

A man with dry, graying skin and a mop of white hair came in with a plastic tray of herbal potions for sale. "No, no, no," Aisha said to him, palm raised as though to ward him off. The man retreated. Ifemelu felt sorry for him, hungry-looking in his worn dashiki, and wondered how much he could possibly make from his sales. She should have bought something. "You talk Igbo to Chijioke. He listen to you," Aisha said. "You talk Igbo?" "Of course I speak Igbo," Ifemelu said, defensive, wondering if Aisha was again suggesting that America had changed her. "Take it easy!" she added, because Aisha had pulled a tiny-toothed comb through a section of her hair. "Your hair hard," Aisha said. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The wealthy white western minority of the world could not hope to prosper if most of the rest of mankind were foundering in hopeless poverty. Islands of plenty in a vast ocean of misery never have been a good recipe for commercial success. ~ Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson Of Lodsworth

On pillow after pillow lies
The wild white hair and staring eyes;
Jaws stand open; necks are stretched
With every tendon sharply sketched;
A bearded mouth talks silently
To someone no one else can see.

Sixty years ago they smiled
At lover, husband, first-born child.

Smiles are for youth. For old age come
Death's terror and delirium.

- Heads in the Women's Ward ~ Philip Larkin

I believe in white knights, but the only knight in this story is me. No one saved me. I've fallen so far that I can't even see the way out anymore. I'm at the bottom of Hell and I found you. ~ H.M. Ward

Nobody ever talked about what a struggle this all was. I could see why women used to die in childbirth. They didn't catch some kind of microbe, or even hemorrhage. They just gave up. They knew that if they didn't die, they'd be going through it again the next year, and the next. I couldn't understand how a woman might just stop trying, like a tired swimmer, let her head go under, the water fill her lungs. I slowly massaged Yvonne's neck, her shoulders, I wouldn't let her go under. She sucked ice through threadbare white terry. If my mother were here, she'd have made Melinda meek cough up the drugs, sure enough.
"Mamacita, ay," Yvonne wailed.
I didn't know why she would call her mother. She hated her mother. She hadn't seen her in six years, since the day she locked Yvonne and her brother and sisters in their apartment in Burbank to go out and party, and never came back. Yvonne said she let her boyfriends run a train on her when she was eleven. I didn't even know what that meant. Gang bang, she said. And still she called out, Mama.
It wasn't just Yvonne. All down the ward, they called for their mothers. ...
I held onto Yvonne's hands, and I imagined my mother, seventeen years ago, giving birth to me. Did she call for her mother?...I thought of her mother, the one picture I had, the little I knew. Karin Thorvald, who may or may not have been a distant relation of King Olaf of Norway, classical actress and drunk, who could recite Shakespeare by heart while ~ Janet Fitch

Dylan Thomas was lying in a coma under an oxygen tent in St. Vincent's Hospital. He had been lying there, unshaven, for three days. The precise cause of the coma was obscure, though he had been heard making the extravagant claim that he had eighteen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern the night before he collapsed. ~ Katie Roiphe

A survivor, in another sense, was left alive. The king's nephew, Stephen, count of Blois, was suffering from a severe bout of diarrhoea and declined to join the revelry aboard the White Ship. Since he would be crowned as king of England fifteen years later, it can plausibly be maintained that an attack of diarrhoea determined the fate of the nation. Statesmen may plot and plan. Learned men may calculate and conclude. Diplomats may debate and prevaricate. But chance rules the immediate affairs of humankind. ~ Peter Ackroyd

Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well to leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of Fate, lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel stay those who to thy sacred portals come to waste the gifts of Freedom. ~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Now,' [her father] barked.
She stiffly followed, still fully dressed in the elaborate navy-and-white gown she had worn all evening. It was hard not to feel as if the bare walls and surfaces she passed had been bled, leeched, into the cloth encasing her. Stripped paint and sacrificed heirlooms clinging to her, demanding she make everything right once more. ~ Anne Mallory

My mother and my father always had me in ballet and dance, and I sang in a girl's group. ~ Jessica White

Hello, Doctor. It's your man. ~ J.R. Ward

TWENTY YEARS AFTER the end of air travel, the caravans of the Traveling Symphony moved slowly under a white-hot sky. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

Why is not a rat as good as a rabbit? Why should men eat shrimps and neglect cockroaches? ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Art is not subject to reason, it is intuitive. When you start creating what your powerful imagination tells you, when you surrender to your spiritual impulse and inspiration completely, without thinking beforehand about the end result of your creativity. It is then as if the emotional range of your sensitive mind has been crafted into the delicate spectrum of colors. A vision of black and white is now a marvel of mesmerizing stains. ~ Jazbia S.

My personal opinion is that you can't be racist towards white people. You can be prejudiced about them, but being prejudiced isn't an illegal act, whereas being racist can be. ~ Jo Brand