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“When the fact of your being is used as a weapon against you, the process of relearning who you are and what your value is, is a long one.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“You say you want a happy ending, but neither of those words is really what you're searching for. For instance, you will not live to see a just world. But you will live to see acts of justice.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Perhaps the thing that is even more overflowing with possibility than a crush, is love. In whatever form it takes, from whatever context it is drawn. With a crush after all there are sort of only two outcomes when you get down to it. It will bloom or it will whither, but love, love seems to have infiinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I've learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“If our religions aren't about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?â€� The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“When one tells a story, one has to choose where to stop. So, for every story, there’s an infinite number of endings, a library’s worth of endings, every book a new chance. Perhaps, for us, for all of us, there are so many endings that they can’t all be heartbreaking and baffling. There must be a place to stop that is just a step into a new possibility.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Even from an early age, my parents imbued in us the knowledge that although life wasn't just, we could always do something about it.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“The thing is, the promise of church is community, salvation, and a relationship with God. If the gay music minister and the person with AIDS cannot be part of the church, where do they find God?”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Everybody loves Elmo, right? Elmo is a closer. Elmo gets all the Glengarry leads. Elmo stares into the abyss and the abyss whispers, “Tickle me.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“...the thing about success is that it doesn't seem like a natural result of unsuccessfulness.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“The storyteller says, 'I am here. Does it matter?' The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, 'I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.' It seems simple but it's a bold declaration.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“I am mouthy, and I get easily annoyed, and I don't know how to shoot a bow and arrow, so dystopias are a solid no from me. I'm basically Peeta from The Hunger Games, except gay. I am here for the baked goods and then basically I'm going to be dead weight. Cut your losses.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“When I first learned about the Dewey decimal system, I assumed it was an impartial way of defining and filing the breadth of knowable information. I came to understand that the intention of the filer and the perspective that they carry play a huge role in how Dewey, and any other system, is employed.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“The Monster at the End of This Book is a lighthearted book about anxiety—anxiety about being confronted with the kind of person you really are (LOL!), anxiety about the inevitable passage of time (LOL), anxiety about being trapped by forces beyond your control (lol), anxiety about a deep, dreadful uncertainty (…meep).”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“How are we supposed to live without a meteor bearing down on us? How are we supposed to find the best parts of humanity without a brutal regime at the door? How are we supposed to tell the people we love that we love them if we're not five minutes from being destroyed?
That's the challenge of being alive.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“For years, I thought that the way to keep myself from getting burned was to set myself on fire first or to snuff out my light.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“SEVENTY-FIVE:
You're exactly who you need to be. Each of you. It may not feel like it; it may seem like it would be much easier being anyone else. You may look back at the person you were at one point and wish that you could instead be the person you are now at that far distant, unreachable point in the past. But you had to be who you were to get to who you are. Every page in the story is successive; they're all numbered and bound like a book.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“The feeling of being alone, I’ve found, is the poison that has no taste. It seeps in slowly and easily; it never seems unusual. Isolation presents as an undesired state but nothing serious, nothing permanent, until the lonely nights become lonely months.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“One of the most fascinating things about the Dewey decimal system is that while there are distinct categories for every subject imaginable, it also allows for internal referencing, acknowledging that while a book may be about one subject and exist in one place, it also has a corollary placement elsewhere. At the same time. And that’s okay. I understood that a book could be many things at once, without conflict or contradiction, long before I realized it about people. Or, at least, long before I admitted it.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Another thing I liked about the Dewey decimal system was that it could sometimes function as a secret code. Every once in a while during my high school years, I would hesitantly and cautiously type “gayâ€� into a search bar in a card catalog. Just “gay,â€� as if more specificity would kill me right on the spot. Libraries were the only space I felt remotely comfortable even acknowledging the question—which didn’t yet even have words or language, just the faint outline of the punctuation. And where if not a library could I go to understand the unknown, to expand my world, to make sense out of gibberish? I would type “gayâ€� and then survey the titles that came up and then click the window closed without ever doing any further exploring. I didn’t know what I thought I might find if I actually went to the aisle where the books were. A very quiet gay bar, perhaps? I figured it wasn’t worth the risk. But as I closed the screen, I memorized the Dewey decimal number of the section where, I presumed, a mirror ball sprinkled stardust across the aging carpet and the rows of books waiting to be opened.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“I laugh and remember that I’ll be dead before dystopia really starts to take hold.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“I think my goal was for people to read it and say, “You are very funny, and racism is bad.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“The library is the place where I could borrow first Grover’s philosophical tome, then a couple of Choose Your Own Adventures I could cheat at, and later a stack of mysteries I could spoil for myself, all attempts to look for some other way of understanding who I was.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“All of us have, at some point, logged on and thought, This seems like a good idea! And sometimes that changes when you discover that the internet is actually just other people, and other people, scientists say, are terrible.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Kristen says, "I keep thinking if I go back to the beginning of the campaign and I say, 'You need to just release all of your emails right now,' it'll be fine. But then I think I should go back further, so i go back to when she's secretary of state and tell her, 'Oh, girl, a private server, no.' But then I remember, LOL, misogyny is the reason we're here, so I need to go back to whenever that didn't exist and I keep going back further and further until I'm all the way back before the Big Bang, and when I get there I whisper to the cloud of dust, 'It's not worth it.' And then I fade away like I'm Marty McFly's siblings.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Every family’s story is a tale of becoming, sometimes through oppression, sometimes through achievement, and sometimes simply through the current of time. We were born grasping after freedom, in a house that could not hold us; every day we get closer and closer to our destination, until our features come into view. Soon, everyone further on down the family line can see us from their seats at the table; we’re coming home.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“We had the easiness that comes from knowing the same stories and knowing which parts you’re supposed to say at what time. I often wonder who the audience is for those stories, the ones everyone gathered has heard every year, the ones most of us lived through. Maybe they’re not for anyone outside of the circle. Maybe the telling is the metronome by which we set the beating of our hearts.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“For all of love’s complications, I think every couple’s story starts with two strangers who, if they want to survive, must move heaven and hell to reach each other.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays