Quin Collins Quotes

“He wasn’t strong because he wasn’t afraid. No, he was strong because he kept doing it even though he was afraid.”

“I did not want to be a hero. I did not want to make any of what had happened in the last week about me. There was a guy who’d just spent six days in the hospital because the guy who’d been my personal hero for four years had put him there.”

“It wasn’t about loyalty. It was about him standing up for what he believed in. And I wanted to be my dad’s son. Someone who believed a better world was possible––someone who stood up for it.”

“I could be all the way across the country in California and I’d still be white, cops and everyone else would still see me as just a ‘regular kid,’ an ‘All-American’ boy. ‘Regular.’ ‘All American.’ White.”

“PUSH! If you don’t, someone else will. LIFT! If you don’t, someone else will. Faster faster, faster, faster FASTER!”

“It was Dad’s voice in my head, or at least what I thought was his voice. I hadn’t heard it in so long, I couldn’t even tell if it was his or if I was making it up. Whatever it was, it got me to where I needed to get.”

“I begin almost every day the same way: Ma’s voice in my head, telling me what I needed to do, what I needed to think about, how I needed to act.”

“Even if they didn’t know Rashad . . . they couldn’t just ignore what happened to him; they couldn’t walk away. They were probably afraid, too.”

“If I didn’t want the violence to remain, I had to do . . . a lot more than just say the right things and not say the wrong things.”

“Had our hearts really become so numb . . . Who am I if I need to be shocked back into my best self?”

“I wondered if anybody thought what we were doing was unpatriotic. It was weird. Thinking that to protest was somehow un-American . . . This was very American.”