“This was the backstage, the green room, the wizard’s booth behind the curtain.”

“You’re gonna ask me that before I have sex?!” she joked. I agree that, yes, the timing was shit and we could totally skip it. But she graciously answered.”

“You see, Lagos always had a goal—to become a megacity, a world class city, a modern metropolis that Nigerians could feel proud to call home. But this dream comes at a cost.”

“He worked summers along the Riviera as a tour guide, he told me, mostly for ‘rich assholes’ but sometimes for ‘nice Russian women.’ These were the two categories into which he put most of the world’s population and I think it struck him as refreshing, if not downright serendipitous, that I didn’t fit neatly into either one.”

“The lunar-like landscape of Wadi Rum stretches out before me—at once, alluring and overwhelming in its enormity. I am an insignificant speck, not unlike the grains of sand beneath my bare feet.”

“Latvia’s first LGBT Pride march in 2006 had been violently attacked by a mob armed with human feces and holy water, placing the country on Amnesty International’s Human Rights Watch list.”

“He still had an enviable crop of hair and beard, now gray and relatively kempt, and though his skin was doughy and shadow-less his eyes were as soft and expressive as a pig's. As he sat at a visitation table in clean blue chambray, he looked less like America's most dangerous criminal and more like the original Maytag Man, waiting fist-to-cheek.”

“There was an entire system in place that revolved around disposal. It was an act of letting go that was deliberate and methodical, an active and almost festive act of losing, antithetical to how I functioned as a person.”

“I walk down Portobello Road, past the bright blue, red, and yellow facades of buildings that I have no desire to enter, past glossy, small boutiques filled with narrow-hipped women…I’m wearing clean scrubs, clogs. A foreigner. Refugee from a hospital, wanting to preserve my other life, the person I was before the sacrifices of this long training.”

“There’s also a strange phenomenon many people have noted, and the motive for retranslating any work, and that is that the translation dates while the original doesn’t.”

“With such a tenuous relationship to our stories, how can the media demand our trust? How can they demand to tell our stories?”

“I was sure that if I threw myself at the sports world when it was at its best I would hit something worthwhile.”

“Irmela Mensah-Schramm started removing hate graffiti one day in 1986. As of 2016, she had removed or altered more than 70,000 stickers or pieces of graffiti.”

“When he got back to Vietnam he knew they’d lose the war because none of the US soldiers wanted to be there. They smoked marijuana in their barracks at night, he said, listened to rock music and read letters from home, sobbing aloud.”

“We laid on a slab of sandstone and watched the moon and listened to the water trickle over red rock glazed moonlight-blue.”

“The whole history of television is executives saying, "No, that female character is too unlikeable, that female character is too obnoxious, that female character no one’s going to relate to. That female character is not sexy enough, is too chubby, is too...”

“We had seen fire, and we had seen rain. We had seen some of the worst desperation the country had to offer, but also the friendliness and kindness that marks so many encounters in the Dominican.”