I cried so hard that if my present crying self could go back in time and see my other crying selves, it would slap them and say, “That shit’s not wor… - Trevor Noah

I cried so hard that if my present crying self could go back in time and see my other crying selves, it would slap them and say, “That shit’s not worth crying for.

We live in a world where we don’t see the ramifications of what we do to others because we don’t live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off.
If we could see one another’s pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place.

Race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason. Humans being humans, and sex being sex, that prohibition never stopped anyone. There were mixed kids in south Africa 9 months after the first Dutch boats hit the beach at Table Bay.

Once we reconnected, I was overcome by this drive to make up for all the years we’d missed. I decided the best way to do it was to interview him. I realized very quickly that that was a mistake. Interviews will give you facts and information, but facts and information weren’t really what I was after. What I wanted was a relationship, and an interview is not a relationship. Relationships are built in the silences. You spend time with people, you observe them and interact with them, and you come to know them — and that is what apartheid stole from us: time. You can’t make up for that with an interview, but I had to figure that out for myself.