Saturday, June 16, 2012

Jumpstart the World

Finished reading Catherine Ryan Hyde's Jumpstart the World yesterday, and really enjoyed it. I keep trying to come up with just the right words about what it made me think and feel, but nothing so far feels adequate. So, in the mean time, I wanted to share some of my favorite passages:

Hyde, Catherine Ryan. Jumpstart the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

(53) Just be as close to yourself as you can possibly bring yourself to be.

(59) I sat alone at a corner table and watched the melee of moving bodies and listened to the racket of voices. And watched the “Us” folks at the usual table. And marveled at the way everybody left us alone. Not like they accepted us exactly. More like, now that they’d labeled us, we didn’t need to exist in their world. If we didn’t do anything special to jump up onto their radar screens, I guess they really didn’t think about us at all.

(74) They weren’t just simple pictures whose only job is to look nice. They had something to say. They were each a sort of document of some kind of injustice. Usually people do all this shouting about injustice. But Molly’s photos just froze the injustice, and then it was right there in front of you. And you couldn’t look away anymore. They just presented you with the injustice and then left you to do the rest of the work on your own. You either cared or you didn’t. But you couldn’t ever pretend again.

(134) Then again, that weird voice over my head said to me, Maybe it’s just the truth. Maybe it doesn’t require any forgetting.

(143) He sighed. “I guess I mean we all pretty much agree on certain things. Equality and stuff like that. But whenever it turns up missing, people just let it
slide. That’s why there’s such a thing as activism. Sometimes you have to jumpstart the world just to get it to be what even the world admits it should be.”



0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home