Wes Moore Quotes

“I found in hip-hop the sound of my generation talking to itself, working through the fears and anxieties and inchoate dreams—of wealth or power or revolution or success—we all shared. It broadcast an exaggerated version of our complicated interior lives to the world, made us feel less alone in the madness of the era, less marginal.”

“It’s unsettling to know how little separates each of us from another life altogether.”

“When my grandparents moved to the United States, their first priority was to save enough money to buy this house . . . To them a house meant much more than shelter; it was a stake in their new country.”

“But even the worst decisions we make don’t necessarily remove us from the circle of humanity.”

“The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his.”

“We were all enclosed by the same fence, bumping into one another, fighting, celebrating. Showing one another our best and worst, revealing ourselves . . . as if that fence had created a circle of trust. A brotherhood.”

“The expectations that others place on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.”

“As I started to think seriously about how I could become the person I wanted to be, I looked around at some of the people who’d had the biggest impact on my life.”

“America allowed them to create a life they couldn’t have dreamed of in their home countries of Jamaica and Cuba.”

“I was becoming too ‘rich’ for the kids from the neighborhood and too ‘poor’ for the kids at school. I had forgotten how to act naturally, thinking way too much in each situation and getting tangled in the contradictions between my two worlds.”

“Wes, you are not going anywhere until you give this place a try . . . Too many people have sacrificed in order for you to be there.”

“We will do what others expect of us . . . If they expect us to graduate, we will graduate. If they expect us to get a job, we will get a job. lf they expect us to go to jail, then that’s where we will end up too. At some point you lose control.”

“Our stories are obviously specific to our two lives, but I hope they will illuminate the crucial inflection points in every life, the sudden moments of decision where our paths diverge and our fates are sealed.”

“From everything you told me, both of us did some pretty wrong stuff when we were younger. And both of us had second chances.”

“Life’s impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It’s what shapes our time here. It’s what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted.”

“My mother saw Riverdale as a haven, a place where I could escape my neighborhood and open my horizons. But for me, it was where I got lost.”

“He also didn’t feel burdened by the thought that early parenthood would wreck his future plans . . . But in some unspoken way, he did sense that he was crossing a point of no return, that things were about to get complicated in a way he was unequipped to handle.”

“Aside from family and friends, the men I most trusted all had something in common: they all wore the uniform of the United States of America.”

“Fighting for your convictions is important. But finding peace is paramount.”

“When it is time for you to leave this school, leave your job, or even leave this earth, you make sure you have worked hard to make sure it mattered you were even here.”

“Your father wasn’t there because he couldn’t be, my father wasn’t there because he chose not to be. We’re going to mourn their absence in different ways.”

“I guess it’s hard sometimes to distinguish between second chances and last chances.”