Tana French Quotes

I am a young, white, educated male. I got really, really lucky. And life isn't fair.

Once you open up the Pandora's box of race and gender... you're never done.

I didn't see myself any different from my white counterparts in school. I just didn't! I thought I could do what they did. And what I didn't do well, I thought people were going to give me the opportunity to do well, because maybe they saw my talent, so they would give me a chance. I had no idea that they would see me completely different.

But I think what Liam said just kind of hit it spot on, that the people in the capital are brainwashed and such a disconnect with what's actually happening. They don't realize what if it was their kids that were being put into the games? They just don't have the mindset to have that kind of compassion for people.

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.

There's drama in everything. That's why I love movies. Like 'Welcome to the Dollhouse.' I'm a 350-pound black man, and I could understand what it was like to be a little white girl.

While everyone's experience of oppression is different and complicated and often overlapping, I really believe that if you have privilege, you need to learn as much as you can about the world beyond yourself.

To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist.

It is very easy for whites to miss problems that aren’t our own; that’s a function not of being white but of being human.

When you have privilege, you have to been quiet and listen.

I am Hindu, upper-caste, male, and able-bodied. So everything is on my side. That gives me the extra cushion that Swara Bhaskar won't get.

It's hard for men sometimes to talk about feminism, just as it's hard for people who aren't from ethnic minorities to talk about racial prejudice. It's a difficult conversation to have, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have it.

Of course, I have privileges that others don't. But, you don't choose where you are born. If you want to hate me for that, I am sorry.

We're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels. And when we begin to realize that we're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels, we find that it is much easier to understand where other people are coming from. All the ones who don't have the same reality tunnel as us do not seem ignorant, or deliberately perverse, or lying, or hypnotized by some mad ideology, they just have a different reality tunnel. And every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world, if we're willing to listen.

Now, for Romney to believe that somebody's grandmother is going to be so cut off she is going to self deport... He certainly shows no concern for the humanity of people who are already here... I think you have to live in worlds of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and automatic $20 million a year income with no work to have some fantasy this far from reality.

We underestimate the distance between ourselves and others. Not just inferential distance, but distances of temperament and ability, distances of situation and resource, distances of unspoken knowledge and unnoticed skills and luck, distances of interior landscape.

I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.

Experience is always larger than language.

Reality is the completion of experience.

Can I reject everything my brain experienced? Is intellectual understanding any understanding at all?

Hereditary wealth is in reality a premium paid to idleness.

The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds.

Nobody has ever been able to experience what they have thoroughly understood - or understand what they have experienced until they have achieved a detachment that renders them incapable of repeating the experience.

You need to see things, REALLY see them, feel them, live them, so you know what’s big and what’s little, what matters and what to put aside.

When were you born, who are your parents, where did you grow up? None of us earns these things. These things were given to us. So when we strip away all of our luck and our privilege, and we consider where we'd be without them, it becomes much easier to see someone who's poor and say, "That could be me." And that's empathy.