27 Quotes by Jeff Hobbs

...he wondered how a person as bright and deserving as Rob Peace could have made the choices, beginning on the night of that banquet, that had resulted in this. And he figured that the choices hadn't necessarily begun on that night. Most likely, they'd begun on the night he was born, and not all of them had been his to make.

But words mattered, more so in Newark than many other places. In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.

Lyric's death reminded us that having a Yale degree on our résumés could open many doors, but it couldn't protect us from life, which didn't much care about résumés.

The men her girlfriends dated were too often angry and muttering about oppression. One of the reasons she took to Skeet later in life was that he never went to that place; he believed with a firm positivity that he didn't need to waste time resenting real or imagined social constructs because he would always be ahead of them. The individual, not the people, was responsible for success or failure.

She was also taking a big risk by hoping this sacrifice would mean something. If Rob turned out like any other rough boy in the neighborhood––if her son wasn't special like she believed he was––she feared the disappointment that would follow too much striving on her part.

Niggers just like to start shit," he said. "They don't value human interaction, let alone human life. They're just stupid, period. They walk around, trying to act hard, trying to be bangers...That's all a nigger cares about: acting hard. Fronting.""What about the brothers?" I asked. This word felt much safer."A brother's like me. He just wants to take care of his own and chill.

[Flowy]'d undertaken this mainly because he'd known that going to public school, with girls, would sentence him to fatherhood by age sixteen, and he wanted to evade that pattern, one from which he himself had been born.

Like a bird handled by humans whose flock would not accept it back, Rob now wore the unwashable scent of the Ivy League.

Look, anything you do, if it isn’t hard, it isn’t doing anything for you. So you’re better off not doing it. Use your time somewhere else.