Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn't even know your name scrubbed your back. Witc… - Toni Morrison

No one can blame the conqueror for writing history the way he sees it, and certainly not for digesting human events and discovering their patterns according to his own point of view. But it must be admitted … that conventional history supports and complements a very grave and almost pristine ignorance. Because the very nature of history is to make large distinctions, it encourages the intellect, therefore, to forgo finer ones. Because historians must deal with rice in bulk, rather than grain-by-grain, heavy dependence on the conventions of that discipline lead us to do likewise in human relationships. If such history continues to be the major informer of our sensibilities, we will remain functionally unintelligent. Because, after all, it is the ability to make distinctions — and the smaller the distinctions made, the higher the intellect that makes them — by which we judge intellect.

We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow.

Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.